


Underglass

by Chromat1cs



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Action Dueling, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Voldemort Wins, Banter, Breathplay, Cigars, Dirty Talk, Dom/sub Undertones, Escape, Face Slapping, Hair-pulling, Illegal Activities, Interrogation, London Underground, M/M, Mad Eye Moody and Dorcas Meadowes mentioned in the same sneer, Marlene McKinnon in passing, Money, POV Remus Lupin, Resistance, Restraints, Roughness, Sexual Content, Smoking, Stakeout, Top Remus Lupin, You Decide, a whiff of Greyback, basically everyone is here but just not in-frame, literally one sentence for Albus Dumbledore, or are they overtones, so many goddamn cigars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-12
Updated: 2019-03-12
Packaged: 2019-10-13 17:34:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 24,496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17492216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chromat1cs/pseuds/Chromat1cs
Summary: King of the low-down, lord of mud and everything beneath the surface—Remus Lupin is the king of sordid exchanges happening under the Death Eaters’ noses. Nobody has ever been able to make a feint at him and survive to tell the tale. But when an intruder drops in, unexpected and wholly disarming, everything tilts just so on its axis and might tumble the lot of it to ash.— Remus Lupin Fest 2019 —





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A world of thanks to Lucca and Jenn for their feedback and support :>  
> I was absolutely awestruck by my prompt and am so glad to have this work to hopefully do it justice:
> 
>  
> 
> _Remus Lupin, half-blood wizard, noticed there was a massive flaw in the sickle to galleon conversation when compared to the muggle conversion of silver to gold. What is a werewolf to do but to become the lord of the underworld of both the wizarding and muggle world?_
> 
>  
> 
> Some of the likes listed were "clever banter" and "chaotic neutral," so I hope as a chaotic neutral tornado myself I was able to capture both of those. The only dislikes was "wishy-washy Remus," and so I made him DECIDEDLY not wishy-washy <3
> 
> All my love for this first year of RLF, many happy returns for its future!!

****He draws deeply on a tightly-rolled cigar that smells of darkened dreams, its smolder heady to tug at the edges of higher perception and blur the tight cramp of the office into a black smear. “Don’t make me repeat myself, Fabian,” examining his knuckles with perfunctory mildness, the skin there scarred and scored with so many years of doing what one must.

“Honest, sir, I didn’t scrape anything. The count is true, if there’s any difference then it must’ve been when Potter was cataloguing our sums.”

“So Potter is the one who skimmed then?” He raises his eyebrows, one nicked at its tail to bisect it as though he means for it to be fashionable but no, it’s only another trace of life spent in the dark—dark like this office and dark like the weight behind his even stare as he looks at the underling trying not to cower before him. “Should _he_ be the one standing in your shoes?”

“N—no, sir, I only meant he—we didn’t scrape, I swear it, sir.”

He narrows his eyes, taking another slow draw on the cigar before resting it on the shallow dish on his desk; _Dragon Barrel 120 Proof,_ ceramic and spotted with age and the soot of many, many cigars. The habit makes him look larger in the way that a wolf raising its hackles looks larger; portentous and sharp, but mostly harmless from a distance unless one continues pressing at its patience.

Fabian is pressing.

“I’ve the accounts here, triple-checked and re-recorded by Fenwick’s own hand.” He flicks a fold of paper at his newest clerk, Gideon’s twin brother recommended two months ago as a shining example of promise, who winces with an unbecoming flinch to miss the catch and must stoop awkwardly to lift it from the rich carpet where it falls.

Fabian doesn’t open the paper, only runs an unsteady finger along its folded edge to mutter, “Pardon my tongue, but Fenwick is a mingy fuck. Sir,” a furtive assertion, as though Fabian has forgotten for a moment how precipitous the current stakes are.

He has to laugh to himself then, to the trembling clerk’s credit. Fenwick _is_ a mingy fuck, a mewling sod who can massage sums like nobody’s business but is about as exciting between the sheets as a puddle of milk. But despite such soppishness, Fenwick can sniff out skimmers in the margins of his account books—skimmers like Fabian Prewett. “The truth doesn’t change the fact I’m missing north of three-hundred galleons. Where did they go, Fabian.” It isn’t a question.

“I—fucking hell, sir, I don’t know, I’m no good with numbers—”

“Hell of an industry to get yourself into if that’s the case.” He draws his wand from its holster beneath his right arm like a scintillating promise, slowly, to look over its polished handle like a lover’s locket with casual happenstance, and watches fear flash in those wide brown hare’s eyes before him. Fabian is pretty in a gaunt sort of way but nothing about the young man could be considered remarkable, not especially this new habit of lying.

“Ask Gideon! He—he’ll vouch for me, he will, I swear, sir.”

Patience wearing thin, he frowns and stands up from the massive chair behind his desk. The cigar remains in its dish to smolder thin fingers of smoke up into the air as though it were bundled sage to smudge the close-walled office against the spirits of bad luck that tend to root themselves into his operations every now and again, the sorts of spirits that would worry him were he a superstitious man. “He’s ‘vouched’ for you once already to get you this position. Do you understand,” spoken low and calm as he moves around the desk with his wand held loose in his left hand, “what three-hundred galleons can buy, Fabian?”

As he approaches Fabian he can see a cold sweat building on the young man’s forehead as those frightened eyes fix in flickers on the well-worn cypress wand, menacing in its dormancy. “A small flat, sir. Or—perhaps the best new broom model, or a—” Fabian cuts off the simpering attempt at a watery smile with a choked whimper when the red glow from a latent spell, something painful for sure and crackling faintly to warm and warp the air around it, alights wordless on that nearing wandtip.

“Perhaps,” he hums, drawing close to caress the coppery hair at the base of Fabian’s skull, almost becoming an inviting stroke with the way he cards his fingers into it before he clenches them, the movement shifting, sharp and malevolent, yanking Fabian’s head back and exposing that freckled throat as the clerk lets out a sound of resistance. “Or perhaps to settle a debt.” His words have become black ice, and Fabian shakes his head around the iron grip while eyeing the wand throwing angular shadows, scleras ivory-white in the strain to behold it, the only source of light in the basement office beyond the red glow of the cigar and a single yellow lamp.

“Not a debt, sir, I swear!”

“On _what,_ Fabian?”

“My life, sir, please, I didn’t fucking skim!”

He can see the lie swimming behind Fabian’s pupils like a fly drowning in ink and he has to smirk at that, a humorless thing that pulls unevenly at the corners of his mouth. “Your life,” he repeats with slow deliberation. His hand is still anchoring in Fabian’s hair, wand poised below that sharp square jaw, so he takes his time pretending to ruminate. “You do know I take very little pleasure in killing people, don’t you Fabian?”

“I know, sir.”

“It’s messy and less than convenient, and I don’t like training new clerks.”

“Yes, sir.”

“My father was a very forthright man, you know, always telling me ‘Remus, be sure you’re proud of the life you live and never prize yourself above another. But never let anyone take advantage of you.’ Are you close with your father, Fabian?”

The underling’s throat bobs and works around words twice before they come; “N—no, sir. He left when Gideon and I were babies, never knew him.”

Remus chucks his tongue once, a sound that might be tender with the way he’s holding Fabian’s head completely negated by the visible terror plaguing the other man’s body. He looks down through his lashes, his eyes sharp and punishing—Remus Lupin, lord of this underworld that he’s built up from the mud with nothing but his own roughened hands and a penchant for finding cracks in the city’s sediment. “Unfortunate. Then it was your mother who taught you how to lie so badly?”

“I’m telling the _truth,_ sir, I—”

_“ENOUGH!”_

Fabian goes quiet at the smack of Remus’ sudden roar as the sound cracks into him solid as a fist to render him dumb. The clerk blinks rapidly in his shock as Remus glares down at him, openly furious now, his calm shed with one word. Three-hundred galleons converts backward to a sinful lot of money that Remus will have to track down now, and even the thought of that effort makes his head ache just behind his eyes. The only sound in the office beyond Fabian’s ragged breathing is the fizzle of his wand, furious and subtle and itching to release its magic, pressing against Fabian’s skin like a wooden fang as the young man shuts his eyes in something that looks like desperate prayer.

“I know you’re lying, you idiot, so _stop fucking trying me.”_ Remus’ voice is so soft through his snarl, such a ghost of a whisper that his lips almost brush against Fabian’s own with each tight movement for how intently he’s arrested the clerk beneath him in a stiff backward bend. “You have _one job_ at your fucking kiosk, do you understand me? You count my money, you don’t keep any for yourself, and I keep you lot safe from the Eaters. Is that entirely fucking clear, Mister Prewett?”

Fabian nods against the strain of Remus’ fingers, wildly, “Entirely, yes,” gasping helpless around his own voice. “I’m sorry, sir, I’m sorry, it won’t happen ag—”

“Make sure of it. _Stupefy.”_

The spell jets from Remus’ wandtip like a needle before Fabian can realize what’s happened. Remus lets go of the back of the man’s neck as the red-orange flash bites to render Fabian limp, asleep, body cobbling into unconsciousness in an instant like a snap-strung marionette when he hits the carpet gracelessly. Remus whistles a sharp little summons of three tones, _E-G-B_ in that reedy shrill from between his teeth, to bring Potter through the door all majordomo’s solemnity.

“Put him in an open cell.” Remus reassumes his cigar behind his desk and jerks his chin at Fabian’s form, splayed there as though he’s a stricken hart with his head thrown back over Death’s bent arm. “Three days, maybe four. Let the spell wear off on its own, don’t bother waking him when he gets there.”

“Sir.”

Potter is halfway back out the office with the clerk slung easily over his shoulder before Remus exhales a thick draw of smoke and sighs. “I’ll also need you to check on the King’s Cross kiosk to make sure they understand the situation. Can you be there tomorrow?” He takes his time to ash the end of his cigar in a slow roll as he watches Potter’s back, grateful to let himself slouch into weariness for a tick of a second. Potter has seen him in worse states than this. Weakness is safe in this moment.

“Certainly. Shall I just bring fists or some hexes as well?”

Remus allows an honest smirk to twinge at his mouth. “Fists should suffice.”

“Sir.”

The door shuts solidly behind Potter to re-seal the solitude of Remus’ study. There aren’t any windows this far beneath the city, his compact kingdom built deeper even than the oldest bits of the Underground itself, but Remus can still feel the ebbing prickle of the moon beneath his skin without seeing her. Last week’s change had been mostly harmless but still a nuisance—he awoke in the woods with blood smeared across his face and gritty between his teeth, not his own, not human; the gamey whiff of some poor rabbit half-torn apart half a mile away from where Remus had awoke that he’d found on his way back down to the ramshackle village he used for its anonymous floo passage. Remus has long been past the point of retching up those impromptu meals when the wolf wants for it, but the mess of it all certainly makes it more difficult to hide.

 _One day you’re going to slip, Remus, and you need somebody there to catch you when you do._ Remus scowls to himself with the unbidden thought of Minerva’s last words, paper-thin, before her heart finally gave up in that glamored little coastal cottage, wind buffeting the walls as though desperate to say its own goodbyes as well. Remus had only let himself call the place home for a handful of weeks after his lone vigil over that death before throwing himself into London full-force, drowning himself in the familiar concrete and tarmac to forget the press of tragedy that he never wore well to begin with. That had been nearly an entire year ago, why the fuck would that memory boil up now?

“If I’m going to slip, Minnie, you can bet your mealing bones there’s someone else I’m pulling down with me.” Remus’ growl doesn’t ring in the deadened silence of his office, but his cigar smolders alongside the deep _chuk_ of the clock against the south wall. The lowest pit of his guts burns with something that feels very much like a portent. Remus Lupin ignores the instinct telling him to expect disaster very soon and resumes cataloguing his accounts.

——

It was a shock when the Death Eaters swallowed the world, but it didn’t take long for it to feel hauntingly normal.

Remus had been six years old—his body only three weeks past bitten and his parents slaughtered, in pain and thrown into Greyback’s snarling pack while he cried and wailed for days to go home—when the signal went out that the resistance had been destroyed. Amid the revelry that night in a flurry of spells and bonfires and drink, Remus had wriggled off into the night despite the fire in his blood and hadn’t stopped running until he found pavement instead of dirt road. The city found him like a tired guardian and allowed him to stay, begrudgingly, as he quietly discovered all her secrets from the vantage points of shack after sorry, sagging shack throughout the following years.

Minerva had found him just after his twelfth birthday. She had no surname Remus ever knew, only the alias of staggering wisdom she wore like a glove; plucked him from the dry space he would squabble over nightly with other war-orphaned Muggleborn snipes, their magic uncontrolled and flying like livewires— _Make Lupin sleep on the floor, he won’t fight back unless you hex him first, just ignore him_. Nobody ever found out about the wolf, of that Remus was sure, but Minerva had looked at him with an approving sort of nod; scrawny and muddied but with harrowing fire in his stare, as though his monthly hideaways were perhaps not the plague they felt like. Her exacting blue eyes didn’t give him the feeling of Greyback’s appraisal he still remembers years later like a brand on his memory. Minerva didn’t seem as though she had plans to use him as a weapon, and that was enough. So Remus had willingly followed her, first for the promise of food and then every time after for the sense of belonging she gave him by simply teaching him how to navigate his own existence.

In a matter of eleven years, which is no time at all in hindsight in the grand scheme of a universe that seemingly wishes to drive him to an early grave, Remus dragged himself up to the top of the underground world. By 1983, his twenty-third celebration of managing not to find his own grave soil, he’s coiled the greater underbelly of England around his little finger.

It was an easy exploit to find when one stops to think about it, a rule on which Minerva had coached him incessantly: seventeen sickles make one galleon, and one galleon converts by Gringotts’ official measure at just shy of five British pounds sterling. One galleon is made of approximately eight grams of gold, and Muggles value gold far differently than wizards do—by about eight pounds sterling per gram, to be precise. The price of Muggle gold has jumped to eight-and-a-half pounds sterling per gram, which means that presently one galleon is _technically_ equivalent to sixty-eight pounds sterling—and rising—according to Muggles, instead of the paltry five quid hawked by the central bank.

Thus Remus Lupin—heir to nothing but an alley in the middle of city and the skin on his back, werewolf, Muggle-born, half-blood—rose to be lord of his monopoly on Muggle-to-wizarding currency conversion kiosks throughout the United Kingdom. The Ministry has long been blind to the needs of any community not made entirely of Purebloods, and so Remus merely swept in to fill their rotting gaps.

But Remus has never insisted that he’s a saint. Far from it indeed. There are turf wars to rage and Eaters to crush under the heels of his boots and in the jaws of a wolf’s mouth.

——

He arrives at his office three days before the full moon, two months after Prewett’s mishap and the whole episodic headache of fixing that mistake, with a chip on his shoulder the size of Denmark. His entire body hurts, he wants desperately for a drink, and most of all Remus wants it to _quit fucking raining._

The hinges on the iron door squeal open as Remus thwacks his fist against the locking ward, charmed only to open for the signature of his and his three closest guards’ skin. He winces inwardly against the sound and wills his back teeth to quit singing with tension. Potter had summoned him with nothing but a tight-handed _“int”_ scrawled in a protean jar on Remus’ bedside table, dragging him up out of dead sleep to curse his whole bloody empire into the mud, for what the fuck is so important that Remus needs to risk leaving his flat in the daytime?

His scowl must be carved far deeper than it feels, for McKinnon stumbles out of his way with a locked briefcase clutched close to her chest and a startled look in her eye.

“Sir?”

“Not now.” He doesn’t even pause to meet the young woman’s dark eyes, and it feels as though he’s hissing the bid to nothing but his own foul mood as he continues forward. His blood has begun to itch in his veins as it always does, the sure sign of an awful moon to come, and he doesn’t look forward to weathering it with all the plotting that’s been flying around the past few weeks. Lucius Malfoy is poking his snakes too close to Remus’ hideouts for his own comfort, and he’s hankering to lop off their forked fucking tongues at the root.

Remus slams into his office to face Potter, who doesn’t even flinch at the sound, and the back of whichever poor sod that’s been trussed to the wooden chair at the center of the carpet. The door bangs shut behind Remus and crackles faintly at its edges as his guarding wards sink into place with him inside them, and Potter nods a solemn greeting. To the intruder’s credit, Remus notices that Potter is wearing a bloom of dark red impact on his left cheek beneath his spectacles.

“He was sniffing around just down the hall, I managed to get his wand and keep him here for the last hour.” Potter winces at the end of his explanation when the intruder barks out a laugh, tossing his head back to rustle the long black hair falling wildly out of a thick plait that reaches down between his shoulders. Remus catches sight of pale skin and the corner of a smirk on the man’s face, and his fury flares.

“You’re funny, ‘sniffing,’ that’s a good one.” The intruder chuckles to himself at that, and Potter mirrors Remus’ carved frown for the flippancy of it.

“Did he pocket anything?” Remus removes his jacket and throws it over the coat rack, in yesterday’s shirt for he couldn’t think to grab anything besides the creased button-down on his way out at Potter’s message, and rolls the worn sleeves up to his elbows with crisp flicks of his fingers. Potter shakes his head once.

“He was folding up a page from last month’s accounts when I found him, but I got it back.” He extends the little square of parchment out to Remus with a nod, and Remus takes it to tip it open with his thumb and scan the line items. _Stratford, 1256ʛ. South Kensington, 389ʛ. Waterloo, 2785ʛ._

“Thank you, Potter. Dismissed.”

Potter dips a shallow bow before moving to the door to part the wards with a touch and a crinkling fizzle as they recognize his magical signature. He shuts it behind him, assuming his guard beside the entrance while the protective magic seals itself back into an unbroken weave again, to leave Remus alone with this unknown intruder. Remus’ pulse quivers beneath his skin with another bolt of anger when he thinks the word, _intruder._ Invading his space, ripping apart his careful warding magic, and for what?

“Your strongarm could be quite nice if he let himself smile, you know.”

Remus’ attention flicks up to the man in the chair, rooted to his spot by Potter’s efficient restraining hexes and a customary length of plain rope around his wrists at the seat back for good measure. He’s attempting to crane his head around to look at Remus, but the furthest he can manage is just barely a profile twist. Remus makes a low sound of acknowledgement in his throat as he pockets the paper torn from his own ledger. “It doesn’t quite do for a right hand to be ‘nice.’”

The intruder rolls his eyes, or what little Remus can see of them, and returns to face front with a roll to his shoulders as though his muscles are beginning to ache. “I disagree entirely. I’m far more willing to cooperate when I’m being charmed than I am when my teeth are getting kicked in.”

“You’re different from your companions then.” Remus smirks to himself as he speaks, rounding the chair without looking at the man tied down on it to cross instead to the ornate cabinet behind his desk. He stole the thing from some hideout in Surrey several years ago, and it’s been the perfect house for his cigars ever since. Fragrant and filled to the brim, meticulously organized; Slughorn dries and rolls them all himself. It’s an expensive habit but Remus figures he can do with some luxury in life that’s had very little of it until now.

“My _companions?”_ The obvious arched eyebrow bleeds into the man’s voice, the crisp curves of Received Pronunciation tugging at his vowels in a way that makes Remus’ insides twist with a combination of derision and aural pleasure. Remus takes his time cutting a cigar and wandlessly charming it to light, drawing smoke with a practiced suck.

“I’ve never met one willing to say anything to me besides ‘Fuck you standing.’”

“While I appreciate the invitation, and wholeheartedly accept if you’re offering, I haven’t the faintest idea of whom we’re talking right now.”

Remus patience trembles when his innermost edges buckle slightly with the implication of the intruder’s words. He doesn’t do himself the favor of turning around to see the man just yet, although he can feel a pair of eyes devouring his back from head to foot. He hasn’t fucked in a fortnight but he isn’t keen on compromising himself, and so he settles for “The Eaters,” a flat bite of speech as he exhales his first plume of sweet smoke.

The intruder barks another laugh, well and truly _barks_ —that’s exactly what the sound is and it beckons unknowingly at the lupine pull lacing each of Remus’ muscles with a brief yank. “Oh, this is embarrassing. I’m afraid you’re mistaken.”

The moments in Remus Lupin’s life in which he’s felt the earth shift, figuratively, are few enough that he can count them on one hand. Among them are the night of his bite; the first time he killed a man; the day Minerva took him from the gutter with nothing but a nod and the words _Come along then._

What he does not expect is to feel it happen, that twist in his heart coupled with the strange inability to breathe for just a moment, while standing less than two meters apart from some nameless, cocksure bastard only just caught digging through his private records and sporting the beginnings of a hearty welt beneath his right eye from Potter’s pummelling.

If Remus were to be honest with himself, he would think _Merlin afire, he’s fucking gorgeous._ But Remus hasn’t been honest with himself since he was ten years old and so, as he pauses to take another slow drag on his cigar after turning to face the intruder for the first time, he lies to himself and settles on the thought that the smooth smile on those curved lips is smarmy and well-bred in the worst way. He’s strangely familiar. Those grey eyes are also quite unnerving, all steel, certainly not molten sterling as they flicker over Remus’ standing body, landing on the steel belt buckle shaped like a roaring dragon. The intruder snorts. It isn’t a kind sound.

“Compensating for something?” His drawl is low and he shifts his hips with a subtle wooden creak in his seat, and Remus glowers instead of crossing the room and sitting himself down on the man’s lap like half his greater processes are pulling at their chains for him to follow.

“Yes,” Remus replies coolly, “an injured sense of security on account of some posh bastard deciding to break into my vaults. How the fuck did you get in?”

The intruder furrows his unlined forehead, sleek eyebrows knitting together, and winces theatrically. _“Posh?_ I’m not the one with a holster made of, what is that, dragon leather?” He juts his sharp jaw at Remus’s shoulder holster, strapped over his shirt like a second skin. A lock of crow-black hair trips out from behind the man’s ear, and he puffs it aside with a sharp spear of breath through the corner of his mouth before having the audacity to give Remus another expectant smile.

Remus draws his wand with purposeful slowness. “Salamander skin.”

 _“My_ mistake.”

“Quite. Now quit hijacking the conversation—”

“Oh, this is a conversation?” The intruder’s voice comes out slightly raised, a disbelieving lift in his tone as though Remus had just told him his train would be arriving ten minutes late. “Where I come from, neither party tends to be restrained in that case. What were you, raised by wolves?”

It’s Remus’ turn to laugh at that, a dark chuckle low in his chest that takes him partway by surprise, and he watches with satisfaction as the light in those silver eyes stutters slightly behind the intruder’s pupils. _Good._ Remus slowly walks to stand between his desk and the tied man, leaning back in a seat on its surface. “Perhaps.” He takes another pull on his cigar before rolling its end in the ash dish and setting the bundle in one of the worn divots. “Tell me your name.”

“I’d rather not.”

“And I’d rather you go fuck yourself, and yet here you are. Your _name.”_

The intruder winces and shifts his hips again. Remus fastidiously does not watch, no matter how bright the flicker of approval is at the base of his own spine for the primal proximity of the movement. “Buy me dinner first and I’ll let you watch, yeah?”

Remus grinds his back teeth together and stands from his lean, crossing to face the man before him with a deep frown while having tiresome flashbacks to his intimidation of Gideon earlier in the month. He can see the vein of well-covered fear in the way the intruder holds himself—proudly, to his credit, with a practiced lounge to the lithe length of his limbs even with the restraints—fluttering in the tightness at the corner of his mouth no matter how confident he can pretend to be. Remus Lupin will always win a war of masks. He’s been wearing his for years.

“We could skip dinner,” Remus hums, getting as close as he’ll allow his act to pull him; too close and he breaks, too close and he might actually _feel_ something and he doesn’t trust himself to do that anymore. He presses a thumb with punishing pressure to a split in the intruder’s bottom lip, earning a hiss from the man that is quite the opposite of disgusted, and drags it across the surprisingly soft skin there to twist his wrist into a grip of thumb and forefinger that tilts that angular chin up ever so slightly. “You could tell me your name, and precisely what the _fuck_ you think you were doing in my records, and then I might let you suck my cock. How does that sound?”

He had calculated it correctly. The intruder’s pupils betray him and dilate wide through a flurry of shallow blinks, and his throat bobs around a swallow Remus can almost hear in the tense silence of the office. He opens his mouth to reply, or perhaps give even more lip, and so Remus battens down his resolve and slides his hand into the base of that unraveling plait and tugs sharply at the roots. The intruder lets fly a shudder of a cry, half-voiced and unbidden and uneven as Remus bares that pale throat, as his eyes fall shut for a moment. “Careful there, at this rate I won’t make it to the dinner table.” His voice is strangled, and Remus ignores how directly the tone of it boosts his arousal.

Remus leans into the man’s ear and stays himself from licking at the shell of it. “You won’t make it out of this fucking room if you don’t tell me what I want to know.”

“Are you proud of yourself?”

Remus draws back to glare at the man, his patience thinning ever more, and says nothing by way of demanding he explain himself lest Remus begin shouting before he truly wants to lose his temper. The intruder looks positively wrecked in a way that spells disaster for Remus’ handle on the situation; he ignores it by tightening the fist wrapped through the soft falls of hair.

“For pinpointing what I like,” the intruder clarifies, “knocking me around a bit. Does this work for you often?”

“I do what I need to when I have a fucking Eater held down in front of me.”

The intruder scoffs and Remus barely stays himself from spitting on the expression that still looks perfectly handsome even when pulled into exaggerated exasperation. “I’ve already told you, I don’t associate with those stupid quims. Death Eaters are gauche and desperate, and I actively strive to be neither of those things. I’m a spy.”

Remus’ fingers clench ever so slightly around the fist he’s buried in the man’s hair. “A _spy.”_

“Yes, very good, ducky, let’s try some harder words next; can you say ‘untie me and we’ll discuss this like adults’?”

The slap rings out like a shot before Remus realizes he’s done it, a sharp stroke across the man’s one unblemished cheek with the back of Remus’ free hand, whipping the intruder’s head to the side with the force of it and a pulling from him a wounded sound that comes out part grunt and part gasp for the shock of it. Remus takes several slow breaths through his nose before either of them move again, his hand held midair at the end of his follow-through with his skin stinging sweetly. Normally he defaults to magic, hexes and jinxes and all sorts of counterspells on which Minerva had coached him incessantly as she brought him up. This was different—a snap, like something hot and iron in him cracking under another’s pressure.

The intruder is the first to break the stillness with a bitter huff of laughter while he rolls the tip of his tongue across his top teeth, and Remus eases back and removes his hand from the long strands of hair with a pang of reluctance he refuses to feel.

“Shit. I was glad to have one side unchecked. Suppose I deserved it, that was pretty base.”

“Watch your bloody tongue.” Remus pauses and swallows before continuing because he isn’t imagining the pulse of arousal, risen like a tide just behind his ribs on the storm surge of sudden awakening, that filled him just then on the wings of the satisfying hit. His voice is a bit too rough at the moment to be properly intimidating, and the hint of humor still dancing behind the slate of the bound man’s eyes is maddening in a way that isn’t entirely horrid. This won’t do at all. “Tell me. Your _name.”_

Remus has roughed up an astronomical number of people up in the past and has hardly ever felt a response like this, this thrumming in his entire chest that smacks of sex and yet is buttressed with something more—something hungry, something violently asmolder. Perhaps, he notices with another passing flash in the intruder’s stare as he looks at Remus sideways through his lashes and shrugs the mussed tail of his plait back over his shoulder, it’s because this one seems to be taunting him right back.

_Enjoying it._

“I’m Sirius Black. I work for Lily.”

He says it with such nonchalance, with such a bitter flavor to his surname, that Remus forgets for a moment to uphold his image. His eyes widen by a tick before he catches himself and narrows them again, but the damage is done—Sirius has seen him slip and now knows it’s at least possible.

He says it without entirely meaning to—what the fuck has addled his guard so mightily that he can’t keep his emotions in check? Six stark syllables; “You’re supposed to be dead.”

“Clearly I’m not.” Remus has a feeling that if Sirius’ wrists weren’t knotted behind his back, the man would be spreading his arms in an open, obvious gesture.

Remus stalks back over to his desk, taking up the cigar again and drawing deeply to bring the comforting hiss of the embers dissolving to ash as Sirius vents a low, frustrated sigh to himself from the chair. _That’s_ why he looked fucking familiar. Sirius Black, Sirius _fucking_ Black—pronounced dead in a full-page Prophet spread just three years ago, an acerbic obituary penned with the careful intention of being just disappointing enough to dig at him beneath the grave: _Misled but not forgotten. Wizard, leader, former heir. Once great, twice fallen._

“‘Once great, twice fallen’?” Remus half-sits on his desk and crosses his ankles as he quotes the image of the paper projecting across the back of his skull from a hazy memory, thinking even back then that the veritable prince of the Purebloods standing unsmiling in his posthumous portrait was staggeringly handsome.

Sirius casts his eyes to the side with a wan smile, and for the first time he looks the part of someone beaten and tied to a chair. Sympathy threatens a bit too close to Remus’ heart for comfort, and he tamps it down with a long exhale of pluming smoke through his nose. “My mother’s last and most impressive insult to my pride,” Sirius explains in a low voice; “I was the firstborn—‘once great’—before I bungled a secret transmission in ‘79 and they spat me out like a bad taste.” He shrugs genially, as though explaining the muddier steps of a rocky night out at some divey Muggle club instead of his own tangled thread of existence. “Exile has a way of making one realize they might have been on the wrong side of the equation, so I faked a death that couldn’t be ignored. ‘Twice fallen:’ once from the family, and once more for good measure from living in general.”

“You were presumed vaporized in a blast that took half a borough with it,” Remus deadpans.

Sirius turns to him with a very skeptical look. “Believe me when I tell you it was exactly the amount of drama necessary to assuage my raging bitch of a mother.”

“Vaporizing seems excessive.”

“Clearly you know nothing of my relatives.”

Remus closes his eyes briefly and smokes in blessed silence for several seconds. The cigar is a quarter gone by the time he looks at Sirius again, growl resumed; “If you don’t mind, I’d like to get back to the point.”

Sirius tugs benignly at his ropes with one wrist before giving Remus a sticky-sweet smile that could dissolve steel. “And I’ve apparently nothing better to do but get there as well, although might I trouble you for some water?”

“No.”

“What, I’m only allowed to swallow something if it’s your load?”

Remus chokes on an inhale when Sirius’ voice wraps around his throat and clenches it hard. The dry coughing fit rings out of him in rough huffs and watery eyes, all while Sirius laughs to himself to behold it. When Remus summons his first full breath and clears his chest with a rough _ahem,_ he glares daggers at the wolfish grin left playing on Sirius’ roughened mouth. “Back to the _point,_ Sirius.”

Something fluttery passes behind Sirius’ eyes at the angles of his name in Remus’ voice, but it’s too fast for Remus to catch at properly. Sirius tosses his head shortly to shift several more locks of hair back over his shoulder with a haughty flick, and though his smile lessens, the corners of it remain around his mouth. “Fine. But I’ll have you know, I do swallow.”

Remus grits his teeth at the same time he clenches a subtle fist in his free hand. “Noted.” He makes to cover the automatic movement forward that he’s all too used to—intimidate, tease, manhandle, and then deliver the lesson home hard on the heels of a spell like the thwack of a ruler across the knuckles. But Remus stops himself, unconsciously unflexing the hand he’d balled up by his side, and thinks perhaps he’ll do his own limits a favor and stay himself as long as he can bear it from roughing up a disastrously attractive man who evidently enjoys it more than a bit. “What do you do for Lily?”

“As I told you, I’m a spy. It’s terribly convenient to be technically deceased, because if I’m ever seen then any authority or report will think their informant is fucking barmy.”

“What sort of information do you gather?”

“The important bits.”

Remus cuts a pointed stare at Sirius, all amber-green purpose and intent with the hint of a raised eyebrow, and it works to make Sirius instinctively adjust his seat and glance away from Remus with a canine-colored huff. “Information about movements, developments, that sort of stuff. Keeping tabs on everyone. Not just you, not just the Eaters. She has eyes on everyone, and don’t tell me you didn’t already know that.”

Humming his assent, Remus lowers himself into his chair and resumes his cigar left listless between his fingers. Lily—the Red Dagger, or Hart, or Fucking Ruddy Mudblood depending on who was asking about her—has been a champion of the resistance for as long as Remus has been ruling the currency exchange. He’s always felt a distant camaraderie with her despite not even knowing what she looks like based simply on the fact that she and him share the bitter bond of losing everything to the Eaters. Lily’s desire to raze the Pureblood empire to the ground is loudly telegraphed and bolstered with deep roots of cels throughout the city, one of many heads on the hydra Dumbledore built before his flagrant death in ‘71, and Sirius Black is the closest Remus has ever gotten to her. It feels a bit like flicking his finger through a candle flame to see whether or not he can stand the singe.

Remus shifts up on one hip as he slips from his back pocket the ledger page Sirius had been caught scouring. He holds it up between two fingers like a playing card. “You were reading my accounts. Why.”

“I’m fascinated by finance.”

Remus slams his fist down on the heavy mahogany in front of him and relishes the way Sirius flinches at the sound. The bound man runs the tip of his tongue along his bottom lip, pausing briefly to worry at the split on which Remus had pressed, and Remus only lets himself track the slow lick for a shaving of a moment. “The truth, Sirius, or you get hexed mute.”

Sirius looks askance across the desk, drawing up from seemingly endless wells of obstinance. “That seems counterproductive.”

“The _truth,_ you bloody chit.”

For some reason Sirius smiles to himself, and Remus just barely keeps from fuming too outwardly. “Fine. Lucius Malfoy has cottoned on to what you’re doing, and he’s going to bomb one of your kiosks to send a message. Lily wants to cut him off at the pass and perhaps earn a few more Eater masks for her wall along the way. I was sent to look for information that would help triangulate which kiosk he’s mostly likely to target, and I figured cross-referencing revenue is one of the most reliable ways to do that. I wasn’t trying to steal or ruin you, and in fact you should be _thanking_ me for trying to help you avoid ending up a sooty smear on the fucking pavement, because believe me when I tell you that Eaters don’t do painless deaths.”

Sirius’ explanation comes out in a rote drawl, as though he’s detailing the hours of his day in arduous detail, but his last few phrases carry some confident irritation in them. He’s sitting up a bit straighter in his seat by the end of it, and Remus is glad to be behind the desk for a moment because the sight of such petulant assertion does maddening things to his flaring arousal. _Shit._ He’s completely ineffective when his guts are twisting so sweetly, and that hasn’t been a problem since he had to punish Dearborn for stealing cigars without being invited to them—bent over the desk, trousers down and cheeks red from paddling, Caradoc had hardly gotten the message beyond Remus fucking him to jellied splendor, but at least Remus had tried. Remus quells his nerves with a few deep pulls of tobacco and decides to let Sirius squirm for just a moment in silence.

“How much of that am I supposed to believe?” Remus speaks through his exhale, smoke curling out from the corners of his mouth and up into the dark edges if low lamplight, while he watches Sirius with the wolf’s acuity.

“All of it. I’m awful at fairy tales, it’s what makes me such a good informant.”

“A good informant?” Remus snorts to himself and fixes Sirius with a challenging stare. “You just told me everything without me even putting wand to your throat. You’re hardly watertight.”

“Perhaps it was my directive to ‘tell you everything,’ have you paused to think about that, _sir?”_ Sirius mocks the intensity of Remus’ glare right back at him, and Remus clenches near every muscle in his body to keep from imploding at the minor riot the unexpected ‘sir’ causes in his veins coming from that lowered voice.

“Do not mock me in my own office,” he warns darkly. A rich smile spread across Sirius’ mouth and, to Remus’ combined fury and hunger, Sirius spreads his knees and tips his hips forward ever so slightly to draw attention to a burgeoning hardness there at the hasp of his trousers. Remus’ mouth goes dry.

“I assure you, Mr. Lupin,” in a cloudy murmur that mixes all too well with the spindles of smoke tracing their way up from Remus’ cigar, “I don’t lie to men who know how to handle me.”

“Shut up.” Remus’ hiss burns his tongue but he refuses to look down between Sirius’ legs, refuses to imagine what lies beneath for him, and makes instead the mistake of holding his eyes. The grey in Sirius’ irises has lost its cool beginnings, no fear left in them now since Remus has so foolishly shown his hand with several slips in his armor, to reflect only amused and sharp intrigue back into Remus’ own stare. Fine then. Two can play at this folly of carnal beckoning. He stands in one stride, stubbing out the cigar with a summative crush before he rounds the desk and looms over Sirius. “Shut the fuck up, and don’t you dare ask me to ‘make you.’”

Sirius drinks him in with a slow sweep of his eyes and tips his chin up archly. “What do I get if I don’t?”

“Well…” Remus slides his left hand into his pocket while his right combs back into Sirius’ hair, pushing it back off his forehead and baring the painfully clear sight of him just barely holding back from shutting his eyes in held-fast encouragement when Remus tugs just so at the roots. “Perhaps I’ll pull your hair just a bit too sharply, or give you another solid slap to pink up your other cheek again. Or maybe I tighten the ropes on your wrists until you can tell me more—how long has Lily been keeping tabs on the Eaters?”

Sirius laughs a little a that, breathless and pale but filled with hot-blooded approval. “I appreciate the way you’re approaching this, but I’m not authorized to share that information.”

“Or maybe I’ll choke you, just a little; right here. You’ve a pretty neck.” Remus slides his hand down out of Sirius’ hair, leaving it mussed as he goes and trailing that touch down to stop right beneath the bound man’s jaw and squeeze lightly at the sides of his neck—pale skin flushes ever so slightly, fits perfectly in Remus’ hand, and Sirius gasps while he squirms with a twitch in his seat.

 _“Fuck.”_ Sirius stares Remus down with the sort of stare that says _Well Bloody Met_ and, damn him, smirks when Remus relaxes his fingers. “Yeah?”

“You like getting choked then?” Remus moves behind him while Sirius follows him with eyes like lodestones, sewn to Remus and turning his head to follow the movement as long as he can until Remus stops behind the chair. He keeps his hand on Sirius’ throat, not pressing but still covering it with the promise of pressure should Sirius do anything less than satisfactory, and bends at the waist to lean in and position his mouth beside the intruder’s ear. “I can hold you down by the throat with one hand while I fuck you with the other, you know that, don’t you?”

Sirius dutifully keeps facing front, out of the way of baiting Remus’ control for the moment, and Remus knows with a thrill deep in his guts that he’s unearthed the artery of Sirius’ full direction. Notwithstanding that he’s enjoying it himself just a bit much for plain professionalism, but he can stand to blur a few lines here. “With all due respect, sir—” and there it is again, _sir_ driving straight to Remus’ desires in a way it rarely ever has coming from somebody else at his mercy in this office—“if your offer still stands and if it’s as big as your disposition makes it out to be, I’d rather you choke me with your cock.”

Remus internalizes the shudder that racks him with the way Sirius volleys this dangerous game between them, and he moves his hand up to grip hard at Sirius’ chin while he tilts his mouth to nearly brush his lips to Sirius’ ear shell with a hiss. “You’ll take what I _give you._ Why didn’t Lily come brief me herself if she knows about Lucius?”

“Lily’s cardinal sin is pride. Mine is curiosity. Go figure.” Sirius’ voice is sheared, and Remus moves his left hand down to grip the height of Sirius’ left thigh through his trousers. He feels Sirius’ skin shift under his fingers as he bites down hard on his bottom lip instinctively before releasing it with a ragged gasp for the pain of the split there. Remus gives him a low susurration in response and strokes his thumb along the ridge of Sirius’ jaw.

“Easy, there. So you’re her baffle.”

“I prefer the term ‘lieutenant.’”

“If she and I are truly on the same side, I’d prefer not talking to a fucking puppet.”

“And while we’re at it, I’d like a bloody vacation. I don’t make the rules, Remus, I follow orders.” Sirius twitches with the arrested movement in his arms from the restraints at his back, clearly one who talks with his hands when his pulse is up as high as Remus feels it beating fast, hummingbird heart, just behind Sirius’ ear. Despite how nice the contour of Remus’ name in Sirius’ mouth had sounded, Remus tightens his fingers into the surprisingly supple muscle of Sirius’ thigh and pushes his chin up just higher enough to feel the breath catch sweetly in that long, marmoreal throat. _There_ it is.

“That’s right. You follow orders. You do _not_ address me by name in this office, do you hear me?” Remus doesn’t have to wait even an instant before Sirius breathes a desperate _Yes_. Remus allows himself then, perhaps with a measure of recklessness, to take Sirius’ earlobe between his teeth and roll it there with the tip of his tongue and lips just barely sucking it. The wolf is pressing at his edges now with such proximity to the full—only three days and his cells are already beginning to spangle, he feels it like a sweet pain beneath his fingerprints—that he can’t help the low growl that escapes him when he tastes the scent of tobacco and lavender and something fresh and wild on Sirius’ skin. “‘Yes,’ what?”

“Yes, sir.” Sirius has abandoned the facade of resistance, and his splayed knees and canted hips are all the tell Remus needs. He’s panting tight, humid breaths against Remus’ fingers where they hold his chin in a vise, and Remus doesn’t ignore the flash of a thought to slide a couple of those fingers into his mouth and see what happens. _Later._ None of this works if Sirius can’t speak, no matter how badly Remus knows parts of him are aching to see what that sharp tongue can do.

“How do I know you’re not a double agent?” Remus breathes against Sirius’ ear, nuzzling the soft skin where the cords of his neck bend deliciously into his skull. He offsets the jarring tenderness by slipping the hand on Sirius’ face around to the black tendril of the man’s bedraggled plait and, wrapping it once around and into his palm, pulling on it steadily to keep Sirius’ head back and his throat bared in tantalizing submission.

 _“Ah—_ the Eaters think I’m dead, remember?” The chair creaks as Sirius shifts, shuddering slightly around his inhale when the movement touches some part of him—more and more likely through the slide of his trousers. “I like keeping it that way. It would be more than a bit fucking stupid of me to show up on their doorstep and prove them wrong.”

“They could be paying you. I know _intimately_ that money can make people very good at lying.”

“I already promised you I’m not lying.”

Remus sniffs a humorless puff of laughter and ignored the rogue thought of how lovely Sirius’ hair feels against the rougher skin of his hand. “And you think I should believe you, a dead man found red-handed in one of my vaults?”

“I think you should look me in the eye and ask me one more time, because I wear my heart on my fucking sleeve.” His words are slightly manic and more than just a bit desperate, straining his vocal cords with the same thick virility as his trousers, and Remus devours the sight of it that hits hard enough on all of his sweet spots to make him assent. He keeps hold of Sirius’ hair but comes round to the front of the chair, standing astride Sirius’ hips with slow intent to tip Sirius’ head back in a rich, indulgent pull. Remus’ heart thunders in his ears with pleasure and power, Sirius’ face level with his belt buckle and wearing those marks of scuffle so well it almost hurts something deep inside Remus to look down at him—Remus summons his wand with a wordless whip of cypress into his palm and presses it smoothly to the buttery stretch of Sirius’ throat.

“Do you think I should believe you, Sirius?”

There it is again, that wild flash in Sirius’ eyes like fish scales in a murky pool. Remus searches the stare for anything besides honesty, anything besides the smoldering plain language of filthy, spurring desire, and finds nothing. Sirius is putty in his hands, and Remus suddenly hasn’t the faintest idea of what to do with that.

Remus leans down, hair still in his fist and wand still dimpling Sirius’ neck, and stops himself the merest breath away from the bound man’s lips. The need to taste the roughened mouth is a racket in his chest and he nearly gives in to it, but Sirius speaks on a hoarse whisper before Remus can construct the impulse; “More than you might know.”

Heart flexing, breath hitching, adrenaline pours through Remus alongside the now-warring compulsions to claim Sirius’ mouth with his own or topple the chair to floor with him still in it. There is a limit, he knows now, to exactly how much tension his body can hold so close to a moon; he’s just surpassed it, with five short words from a voice patently begging to be fucked into submission beneath him.

Remus releases Sirius’ hair and steps back as though burned, and the disappointment that skates across Sirius’ face before the man masters his expression down to bland observance is sharply wounding. Remus’ fist is clenched around his wand, and he tightens it further as he summons Potter with a whistle— _E-G-B_ as ever, doesn’t want to Ever Go Back home without ripping off his belt and fucking into Sirius’ mouth; he imagines it in a vivid flash and takes one more step backwards for good measure. He can’t. This is stupid, fucking madness.

Potter enters the office two beats later with the hiss of parting magic like the hiss of Remus’ cigar and the hiss of Sirius’ approval, immediate and hot on Remus’ senses and— _Fuck, Lupin, stop thinking with your cock._

“He’s one of Lily’s,” a gruff explanation to Potter with a broad gesture as Sirius frowns and floor and shifts his legs shut, and Remus tries to avoid looking at him for just a shaving of a second too long. “I want him watched for at least four days, need to make sure he isn’t informing anyone besides her.”

“If she thinks you’ve killed me, she’ll send Meadowes.”

Remus glares at Sirius at the mention of the woman with more Eater kills under her belt than Mad Eye himself, and he can’t parse whether the bolt of anger is for the advent of Sirius speaking or the drop of Meadowes’ name. “I’ll let her know you aren’t dead.”

At that, Sirius barks another of those sharp laughs as Potter charms his tied hands unstuck from the chair and hoists him up into a stand. Remus bottles up his mild surprise to find Sirius near as tall as himself on his feet, and Sirius catches the flicker of encompassing observation with a secretive little tightening at the corners of his eyes that almost looks like humor to match his irreverent laugh. “What news indeed,” he croons, the last thing on Remus’ ear before Potter ushers him out with a firm hand and slams the door behind him.

Sagging into his chair once left alone is becoming obnoxiously routine. Remus charms another cigar out from the cabinet, sets it to light, and smokes it down in record time with the searing afterimages of Sirius wrecked and ready beneath his hands flickering across his thoughts in a maddening, fiery flurry.

_More than you might know._

Despite his solo accomplishments, the horrible and the upstanding alike, it still seems that Minerva was right. Remus has much to learn about the way the world works. He frowns at the empty chair, taunting him from the center of the rug, and clenches an unconscious fist on his knee.

It may be true, but he doesn’t have to like it.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Fuck" word count: 82.  
> New record.
> 
> Enjoy about 15.2k of pure sass and sexual tension, I apologize for nothing [garbage confetti toot]
> 
> Thanks again for the love on this one! It was a super fun universe to explore, and I hope you enjoy where I've taken it <3

“Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you…”

The tiny orange flame at Remus’ fingertip illuminates a rind of dirt beneath his fingernail, beneath every fingernail, with a cupped shadow as though the universe only exists in this small microcosm of huddled nighttime. He sets it to the knobbled twist of fraying rope, propped up between a small mound of stones, and waits patiently for it to catch. He is a very patient boy when the moon is nearly new like this, willing to sit still in an alleyway for several hours at a time to stay out of sight.

“...happy birthday, dear Remus, happy birthday to you.”

Sung to himself, under his breath in a hoarse little wheeze, the song seems infinitely less celebratory than he knows it should. There should be twelve candles, twelve little pieces of burnable things, in this pile of rocks that should be cake—or bread, or at least _something_ edible and sweeter than the tac or moldering soup he and the other Muggle-born waifs can scrounge up in the nighttime. He blows out the flame and feels tears bundle up in his throat like a tight fist. _Damn it._ He won’t cry. He isn’t a baby, he’s 12 years old now, Remus Lupin _doesn’t cry._

The sound of boots on gravel makes his breath seize and tightens every muscle in his scrawny body. Hunched up over his knees like this he’s terribly vulnerable, but the protective magic that instinctively floods down to his palms makes his arms tingle with heat. _Could hurl a hex,_ he thinks wildly to himself, _Got a disarm and a Stupefy and—_

“Hello there.”

Remus is surprised to hear an older woman’s voice come from the severe silhouette that steps into the mouth of the alley, backlit by the blood-mauve and quickly-setting sun. He shrinks further into the shadows, his heart racing, and wills his hands not to shimmer with their spangling, unbridled magic.

“I’ve already seen you,” the woman calls out again after several tense moments of Remus silently wishing her gone; “It doesn’t do to pretend you’re invisible. Come out here, I’m not going to hurt you.”

 _It’s a trap._ It’s a trap, it’s always a trap. Greyback told him the same thing, coaxing Remus out from his window as one of the mangy packmates slunk in to kill his parents, slew them where they slept—Remus squeezes his eyes shut and shakes his head as though that ash cloud of sickening memories can be tossed away like blackflies. He huddles further back into the corner, hands jammed up under his arms to cover their glow, as the woman steps forward. Light from a half-dead streetlamp flashes dully off of something that might be spectacles as she goes.

“If you’re planning to fire a spell at me, you might want to rethink that.”

Remus holds in a gasp when she draws the undeniable shape of a wand. _Pureblood._ That’s it, she’s come to exterminate the mud orphans running around in this borough. Adrenaline lights through him like quick tallow, as though the moon has suddenly risen full and dumped her curse into his veins like turned wine, and Remus scrambles to his feet with the best snarl he can manage without the help of monstrous misfortune. “Stay _away.”_

The woman stops, several paces away, and the same slice of light illuminates arch surprise on a long, purposeful face. If one could be made of steel, forged like a sword, Remus’ basal attention to scraps of detail amid minor panic decides that it would be this woman. “I’m not going to hurt you,” she repeats steadily, her expression calm as though she truly believes her own words. Remus’ stolidity falters, and his stomach growls with an untimely lurch.

“What do you want,” Remus hisses as he hopes to cover the sound of his weakness. The phantom of his risen hackles is glass-sharp at his neck, brittle in his bones, and he does his best to stay the instinct that pulls his top lip in a wrinkling curl to show his teeth. It works but halfway. The woman doesn’t seem phased.

“You’re hungry.” She says it like it’s obvious, and for some reason that makes Remus bristle further.

He takes another step back, and when his wiry shoulders meet the balding concrete behind him all he can think is to dredge up the angular curse that flies between the other Muggle-borns like a livewire; “Fuck you.”

“I’m right.”

“Fuck you!” He says it again like it might change the woman’s reaction, but there she remains: impassive, wand drawn, cloak clasped shut against the night to turn her into a solid plinth of observance that makes Remus feel like an ant scrabbling to get out from under one of the other orphans’ thumbs. One of her dark eyebrows arches and every muscle in Remus’ body tenses for action when she reaches into one of her sleeves—but instead of some other agent of magic coming out, she has in her hand a paper sack.

“Here,” she says, gesturing subtly with the little bundle. Remus sniffs once and _Oh,_ it’s heaven on his nose—something roasted, seasoned with sage and more salt than he’s tasted in perhaps six month combined. His mouth waters and his stomach groans again, a pithy thing, fussy organ in his belly, so he scowls like anger can stave off starvation in any way at all. He stares at the woman, daring her to move first.

It takes four long minutes, minutes he counts instinctively as he’s learned over the years of watching Pureblood mud-hunters winnow their way through the streets with his breath held, in which Remus ignores the mighty headache of hunger and the stiffness plaguing his muscles from so much tension—the woman sniffs a thin sigh. “Alright then. I’ve caught traces of your magic here for the past several months, and if you’re not careful somebody else is bound to sense it as well. I’m getting you out of here before you end up a smear on some bombed-out wall, because you’re as good as dust if an Eater finds you first.”

Remus blinks at the casual calm in the woman’s voice as she describes the gore of his own supposed end. He swallows around words before his voice will come up again around the combination of doubt and hunger’s gnarled grip; “Why should I believe you?”

The woman waves her wand without preamble in a tight pattern that makes Remus flinch in automatic defense, but the magic that pours from it isn’t directed at him. The spell that materializes with wordless magic swirls to life in pale blue with a barely-there crackle to the air, alive and metallic, quickly weaves itself into the liquidy figure of a cat. Not the sort of alleycats that Remus has had to scare off from the driest corner when it rains, oh no. It’s a regal creature, all poise and grace as it bounds around as though the air is made of low garden walls. Remus only realizes his mouth has fallen agape when Minerva takes a step toward him and he needs to snap it shut to snarl at her again.

“Calm.” She raises a hand in openness and sets the sweet-smelling bag of hers on the ground between the two of them, her eyes holding Remus’ closely all the while. “That’s an agent of protection I’ve just cast. You can trust me.”

Remus’ eyes flick quickly between the paper sack and the cat apparition, which is in the process of watching him coolly as it licks a paw when the spell washes itself away like dust being sighed off into the air. Remus flexes his jaw in a habitual tightening and re-tightening as his fists do the same by his sides. The magic in his limbs has crawled back into him, but his guard is still up and plenty prickly. He nudges his chin at the offering.

“What’s in the bag?”

“Roast pheasant.”

He’s on it in a flash, darting to grab it with the practiced snatching motion of one too used to squirreling his food away from the view of other Muggleborns. The skin of the pheasant is hot under his fingers as Remus rips and tears at it, pulling it apart within the sack and cramming the meat into his mouth. He grunts around the first bite for the virility of flavor—an assault on his tongue, warm spices and savory juices that drip down his chin with the next fistful of steaming, stringy meat, and Remus tears the bag the get at more of the roasted bird and rip it into fat bites that he shoves past his lips in wide mouthfuls. If he begins crying a weak little stream of tears as he goes—whether for the blistering heat against the roof of his mouth or the emotional labyrinth of being fed out of pity for the first time in months, he can’t know for sure—neither he nor the statue-woman mind to comment on it.

Remus devours the pheasant in a matter of minutes, swiping messily at a mouth and chin glistening with rendered fat and traces of spit with the same greasy hand that also smudges at his tears. He’s quiet for a moment, stilling himself with uneven breaths through his nose while his tongue runs over and across his teeth and the nooks of his cheeks to keep the memory of flavor as long as possible, and he wishes for this woman to break the silence again. She doesn’t grant that this time. “What makes you different,” he finally insists, a rough bark around a belch that takes him unawares for having such food for the first time in too long.

“I won’t use you.”

When he looks up at her, nothing but honesty meets Remus in that cold, blue stare. He scrapes for anything she might be hiding beneath it—cruelty, buried intent, any ounce of derision—and finds nothing. “What’s your name then?”

She takes a step forward and extends her hand. Her nails are short, economical, cleaner around the beds than Remus has ever seen since being spat out into the streets. He takes it and finds warmth and strength. “Minerva,” she says, and it feels like a decree of some sort. Her handshake is firm. “And what should I call you?”

Remus hesitates for a moment, but something in him spurs for connection beyond all the calcified layers of loneliness and spite that have built up through a childhood that left him no child at all but something wild; something rashed and scarred as though thrown from a moving vehicle and skidding for miles on an unfamiliar road. He swallows thickly and tightens his grip on Minerva’s palm. “Remus.”

Minerva just barely smiles at herself with a small nod, as though she knows some sort of secret or joke behind Remus’ name. He almost snaps back at that with more adolescent anger, unstable and aimless and fire-bright as his own spirit, but Minerva has already let go of his hand and turned with a tight swirl of her cloak, crisp footsteps brooking no argument but _Follow._

“Come along then, Remus.”

—

_“You’ve held my best informant for five days. I fail to see why you need him any longer, he was instructed to tell you everything you need to know should he even be caught in the first place.”_

Remus glowers at the charmed red envelope hovering before him, pursed like an expectant pair of viper’s lips and, even without eyes, seemingly returning his ire tenfold in its creases as it waits for a response. He hasn’t slept well—hell, he hasn’t slept hardly _at all_ since the moon two nights ago atop the looming fact of the insolent wretch of this _informant_ toppling into his entire operation. Remus rubs at his eyes with one hand and holds in a sigh. “It’s protocol, Hart.”

The envelope crinkles with a sound too close to a scoff to be accidental. _“Protocol? By all counts, you should have him seated on a fucking throne for warning you about what I’ve found out they’re planning.”_

There aren’t enough cigars in the world to help Remus suppress the low growl that rumbles in his throat at yet another person telling him what he should be doing with his own fucking business. He’s only let himself visit Sirius in his cell twice, and both times left him with the twinned internal pressure of wanting to reach in to shake the bastard until his head lolled off, finally shutting him up, and needing that sharp-tongued mouth doing sinful things to multiple parts of Remus’ body. _Come on, all I need is one glimpse of the sodding sunshine,_ Sirius had taunted last time, leaning just so against the bars that Remus couldn’t ignore the curve of that fucking neck, oh, Sirius had known _precisely_ what he was doing; _How are you not some sallow mess, spending all your time down here?_

“He broke into my records.” Remus snaps the thread of the memory in two, efficient and exacting, refusing to let that phantom feeling of burning desire kick up from the bedrock in his belly as he fixes another stern look on the envelope. “By all counts, I should have taken one of his fingers before even asking for his name.”

_“How medieval of you.”_

“In case you haven’t heard, I’m not the most civilized of us.” He doesn’t quite mean for it to come out on a snarl, but it emerges as such nonetheless. The envelope expands slightly, as though Lily is raising her eyebrows coldly on her end of the wire line.

_“What I’ve ‘heard’ is that you prefer rabbits and other sorry little rodents once a month, plucked right up from the forest floor. My spy is not a squirrel, Mr. Lupin. Send him back.”_

Remus seethes. Possessiveness rises in him beneath a thick layer of petulance, and he leans back in his chair so far that the huge wooden carvings that make up its high back creak faintly with the motion. “Not until he’s finished helping me.”

_“With what.”_

“Circumvention.”

_“If you’re planning on meeting the Eaters head-on, you’re even stupider than you are careless.”_

Remus leans forward again, pointing a rigid finger at the envelope with a frown that could curdle purified water. “Watch your tongue, Hart, you’re in my fucking office.”

 _“And you’re in mine.”_ The envelope creases on one side, vaguely mimicking the shape of one putting a hand to their hip or perhaps examining their fingernails. _“Tell me, Lupin, have you faced an Eater before?”_

“I ran with Minerva, you tell me,” Remus spits. He takes up the fresh cigar waiting on the lip of his ashtray, needing something between his teeth and burning between his fingers lest he begin tearing at the corners of this fucking envelope to keep himself sane.

_“Not the same. Things have changed in the last five years, they aren’t like they used to be.”_

“What,” Remus lights the tip of his finger and sucks on an inhale, letting the tobacco run its invasive calm through his veins. “Do they now fight with swords or fucking, what, rabid familiars?”

 _“They’re threatening to bomb your kiosk, Remus._ Bomb. _Muggle warfare. This isn’t just wands and spells any longer. They’re learning from the worst of us.”_

For a moment, his lips frozen around the cigar and eyes flicked up to watch the envelope in a stare as sharp as the wolf’s, Remus wants to ask Lily to clarify. _Do you mean the worst of us, as in those knotted up in this fucking war, or the worst of_ us, _as in those of us who dared to be born less than wholly magical? Have you bought into the same rotten ideology you’ve pledged to fight?_ But it’s too complex to air in the limited scope of talking to a fucking piece of paper. He remembers to inhale before he breathes out a fine-fingered plume of smoke that takes several seconds to dissipate. “I need to keep the spy for one more week.”

_“A week?!”_

Very suddenly, Remus remembers all at once why he despises working with others.

“I have a plan, Lily, and no—” the lie comes easily without a pair of piercing eyes, he’s been told they’re startling green, to match his across the desk. “—it doesn’t involve rushing anybody full-tilt.”

 _“I never said full-tilt. Five days.”_ The envelope crackles, bunching at its center like a sour grimace. Remus fumes.

“Six, or I don’t send him back at all.”

Silence, for several long moments. Remus tries to ignore the tugging in his gut at even the flash of a thought of letting Sirius Black out of his grasp, whether for vindictiveness or selfishness he can’t decode. He smokes several centimeters of his cigar in one draw without thinking.

_“Fine then. Six. If he isn’t back in my compound before midnight next Saturday, you’re going to have a lot more on your plate than a squad of angry Eaters.”_

“We’re on the same fucking side,” Remus deadpans, furious, his free fist tightening with faint pops of his knuckles on the desktop.

 _“You have my best spy in your brig, wasting his time as well as mine. As far as I’m concerned, that’s sabotage.”_ Before Remus can defend his stance, the envelope begins curling in on itself and falling to chunky, ashen pieces not unlike the crumbling end of Remus’ cigar. “ _Six days, Lupin. Don’t fuck it up.”_

The paper hisses as the charmed wire line dies and leaves Remus truly alone in his office. He breathes out slowly, one of the pieces of freshly-magicked ash fluttering away with the moving air, and shuts his eyes briefly. _Don’t fuck it up._ His mantra, it seems, for what feels like far to goddamn long.

—

Potter leaves him with a sideways look as Remus slams the brig door shut behind him. Remus can tell his right hand thinks it’s an awful idea to do anything but send this high-bred prick back to Hart with his tail tucked between his legs—although knowing Sirius, however briefly, he would probably saunter the whole way regardless. But Remus Lupin did not rise to the top of one of the strongest arms of the rebel underground by caring for what others tend to think of his choices.

“Ah, supper time already? What is it tonight, shit-stew or shit-sandwich?”

Remus steps into the throw of yellow light amid the dark of the brig, cast from the single bulb caged several feet up on the outer wall of Sirius’ cell. His face is trained into a staunch glare, and yet when Sirius sees him the bastard’s face splits with the slow, surprised crawl of a smile as though they’re looking at one another from across a freshly-made bed at a bordello. The spy is clean-shaven, kicking up such a fuss after two days without a shave that Remus had to give Potter the unenviable task of ridding Sirius of the stubble along his chin each day thereafter unless they wanted such a racket that no one in the compound would ever work peacefully again. Remus would have done it himself, save for doubting his strength against either cutting the man’s throat by “accident” or buckling under the subtle eroticism of paring away at the skin so near Sirius’ mouth.

“No supper until we talk.” Remus keeps his voice flat and low, the sort of voice that says _You will listen and shut up_ without accidentally revealing the very deep truth just one layer beneath that which says _I’ve wanked hard and fast to the thought of you tied to that chair for near four days running now._

“Something tells me your talk alone will be better than the tac your majordomo delivers. I’m sure I’ve lost some meat off my bones here, and thanks kindly for your piddling shower but personally I feel like I’ve been bathing in some river nymph’s piss stream since Tuesday. Things can’t get any lower for me, so sure.” Sirius had risen to announce his voice into the deadened concrete, gesticulating with those graceful limbs of his and looking every part of some sorry John the Baptist in a sullied designer shirt still crusted with his own blood, and presently he stops with a scuff of his boots against the hard ground. From this near, he’s still smiling—but Remus sees something violent swimming in those grey eyes, a sharpened steel ring dormant beneath a stormcloud stare; “Let’s _talk.”_

“Lily wants you delivered back to her.”

Sirius barks a laugh, tossing his tangled hair over one shoulder. “She never wanted me trapped up to begin with, of course she wants me back. I have other assignments—as tempting as it is to try to convince you to make me your kept lady.”

“You know which kiosk Lucius is targeting.” Remus ignores the way Sirius rakes his eyes over his body through the bars—shoulder harness, pressed shirt, trousers and all. He resists shuddering with something too close to _Need_ to be comfortable.

“I do,” Sirius hums. He looks down at the inside of his wrist, perfunctory, as though blithely cataloguing his pale freckles. “That is _very_ valuable information for you, isn’t it?”

Remus clenches his hands, staying from punching the flat of his fist against the cell bars. He slips them into his pockets as an extra measure and exhales slowly. “Yes, indeed it is. Share.”

“I’d rather trade.” Sirius crosses his arms then, wrists still faintly scabbed in a couple places from where the ropes had bitten into him behind the chair. The weal under his eye from Potter has faded into a dull yellow, sure to go brownish and then disappear within the next few days, nearly viridian under the alabaster cast of Sirius’ skin. Remus clenches his teeth.

“I bargained with you not one week ago; I’ve just had to bargain with your leader for more time to keep you here, I’m sick of fucking _bargaining,_ Sirius, now tell me what the fuck I need to know or I’ll have part of you painted across that back wall in less time than it takes you to make another fucking innuendo out of that.”

Sirius lowers his chin, leveling his stare at Remus and pursing his mouth slightly. “You told Red Hart bollocks to her plan and rammed your own through?”

“In not so many words, yes.” Remus finds a galleon in his pocket between his right thumb and forefinger and begins worrying it through them, over and back, over and back, still keeping Sirius pinned with a lancing glare. “You deduced where Lucius will strike, and now you’re going to figure out when.”

“Impressive. But, you understand, I would still prefer to just go home.” Ignoring him completely, Sirius kicks a pebble by his toe. It clatters across the floor, echoing dully through the otherwise emptiness of the brig, and rolls to a stop beside Remus’ own polished shoe. “There’s work to be done, you know.”

“What could be more important,” Remus growls, taking a single step forward— _Come on, make it two, reach in, take him by the collar, touch him, Touch Him_ —to redouble the virility of his stare, “than intercepting and offing a whole cabal of Eaters?”

“They don’t get ‘intercepted,’ do you understand that?” Sirius takes his own step forward, one hand wrapping white-knuckled around the bar beside his face, staring Remus down so fully and so suddenly that Remus almost flinches backward. He stays himself, just barely, pressing his thumb into the pocketed galleon in lieu of leaning forward to seal the distance between the two of them— _over and back, over and back._

“How do you mean.”

“I mean they read magic differently than we do, there’s something in the way they’ve culled their ranks to keep only the strongest among them on the field. They resonate together, like some great fucking pipe organ. We infiltrate, they find us immediately.”

“Counter-resonance,” Remus replies immediately, whipping the coin up into his fist to grip it so tightly in his palm that he feels the edges bite into his skin. “I’ve been bending my magical signature for years. Don’t tell me Sirius Black isn’t privy to something a mud orphan mastered when he was still a child?” He lets his smirk cut, and deeply, but if Sirius is phased he doesn’t let an ounce of it show on his face. In fact, he snorts a haughty bolt of air.

“Of course I know how to disguise my signature, I’m supposed to be dead. I can come off as anyone I want to be.”

 _Shit._ Remus licks his lips, refuses to see the way Sirius’s eyes track the dart of his tongue; he hadn’t thought of that. He’s too caught up in this maddening allure before him, tall as an ice column, staring him down like a hound on a scent. Remus is losing his edge the longer they stay in proximity.

“Then you _can_ infiltrate.”

“It’s never been a matter of can or can’t, it’s all a matter of will I or won’t I? I spy precisely because it means I don’t confront anybody.” Sirius cuts an appraising look at Remus, and for a moment it feels as though he’s the one sizing Remus up for a job instead of the other way around. For a moment, the feeling is pleasantly shocking. “I’m better at working in the margins. Not all of us have the right teeth for biting our captors head-on, _sir.”_

Remus’ chest clenches mightily with the knowingly-placed honorific, and his guts roil with the serpent’s grin that bleeds across Sirius’ mouth when he sees the work it does. “But you’ve teeth nonetheless, don’t you?”

“Aye.” He’s still smiling, and he leans just close enough to the bars for Remus to catch a curl of his scent. It’s scrimmed over with several days of the brig’s meager shower water and the lack of fresh clothing, but the sharp spice of tobacco and something lightly arboreous wraps around Remus’ resolve and tugs so hard it nearly buckles.

“Good. Then tonight you’re going to wrack that pretty head of yours,” Remus hisses, wrapping his own hand around the same bar overtop of Sirius’ grip, squeezing with punishing, promising pressure around Sirius’ fingers— _warm, pliant, long; put them in your fucking mouth, suck on him til he begs_ —”to determine when we intercept the fucking snakes, and then you’re going to tell me exactly where we go. You will follow my orders to the absolute _granule,_ and if you don’t I will see you _very_ well-punished. Any questions?”

Remus regrets the demand immediately when he sees the smooth curve of Sirius’ lips twitch up at one corner.

“Yes. Are you ever going to let yourself fuck me?”

Sirius watches him like an impudent cat looking down the length of a very sharp knife, and Remus wants for something doused in bourbon the second he leaves the brig. “Not if I can help it,” he seethes coldly. Sirius raises his eyebrows and nods to himself.

“Noted.”

“Do we have an understanding?”

Sirius’ tendons shift slightly under Remus’ iron grip, and a moment passes before he sticks his free hand out through the bars. “I help you ruin Lucius Malfoy’s day and you let me go. Sounds clean enough. Although, can I trouble you just one more step further for a real shower before we pull the trigger on the mission, just in case I have to face Saint Peter looking like I crawled out of the fucking sewer?”

Remus stares at the space just between Sirius’ eyes lest that silver warlock’s gaze of his further spell Remus into a stupid choice like leaning forward and kissing him roughly. He lets out a withering sigh. “I’ll look into it. _Agreed?”_

Sirius clasps his hand into a firm shake, and Remus bites down on his back teeth to keep from melting into the contact. _Fucking hold it together, you idiot, you can’t trust him as far as you could kick him._ This is a disaster. The longer he keeps a dead man in his brig, the worse Remus can likely assume it will get.

“Agreed,” Sirius all but purrs.

—

The daylight stings his eyes more than slightly when Remus legs his way up the back stairwell onto a desolate side street two days later, leaving one of the several locations with hearths artfully shut off from the rest of city access. Minerva had taken pains to set up an ironclad web of transport for their operatives over her years of building up their footing, and Remus has never been keen on letting the temptation of convenience hamper his care for secrecy.

“Fucking lord and _lashings,_ how many bloody Floos do you tend to cross in a day? _Fuck.”_

Remus’ companion for the day, stumbling and blinking in the afternoon, is clearly not made from the same muster.

“Nine.” Remus doesn’t bother looking over his shoulder when he begins walking. The cluttered sounds of rubble beneath bootsoles alert him to Sirius tripping once, twice, nearly three times as he curses to himself under his breath. Remus fights the rueful smile away from his mouth. “Don’t tell me the heir to some of the oldest magic this side of the Mediterranean is allergic to charmed travel?”

“The heir to some of that ‘oldest magic’ is about to vomit on his shoes, so kindly please keep walking. I’ll follow you at a length, yeah?” Sirius’ voice is rough for a roiling stomach but steely-edged with a snide sort of covered-up embarrassment that Remus used to wear like a second skin. It would be endearing if not for the looming reality of what they were about to walk into, voluntarily, in a matter of hours. Remus grinds his teeth together, turns up his collar to the jarring brightness of the daytime, and  keeps walking.

Sirius had summoned him to the brig—and yes, Remus was painfully aware of the cognitive disconnect of Sirius doing the summoning from behind Remus’ own lock and key—merely a day after brooking his deal with Remus. He looked even more the part of prophet with his straggled hair so twisted into something resembling a knotted braid, leaning in a seat against the far wall of his cell, a lion in repose. _Two days, Lambeth North, likely at midnight._

 _Walk me through your process._ Remus’ inner struts had groaned faintly for trust, scraping for what his body seemed lately to want more than anything else beneath the crust of his history, and yet he held it back.

 _It’s central, it fits with Lily’s intel for timing purposes, and Lucius likes a show; you should have seen the way he demanded my cousin’s hand in marriage. The ledgers I found before your man yanked me out of your stores last week showed a very high yield for that kiosk to boot. And the cover of night is a very handy veil for doing bad things;_ Sirius’ stare had lingered deep in Remus’ pupils with that, mannerless fish playing in dangerous water, and damn it all, Remus could feel himself slipping. _But even more than that is,_ _as you likely know, two nights’ time brings a new moon. A fine cover of fuller dark atop those hideous masks of theirs._

Ignoring the smoldering fury of everyone somehow divining his lycanthropy out of nothing but conjecture and a few lucky guesses these days, Remus had swallowed ever more pride and laid out their plan—pay Sirius the debt of allowing him a real shower the morning of, stake out the tube station, and wait until nightfall. The genius of planning for a new moon is certainly something Remus would have considered, but he isn’t so sure the Eaters are as smart as they are ruthless. They own the city, after all. They may very well strike in broad daylight for the simple fact they’re getting bored of waiting.

The short walk to Remus’ building is empty as usual, a vein of the city in which daytime holds nothing for its denizens but the misery of accidentally catching their reflection somewhere. By night it bustles like the last comb of a hive on the brink of ruin, but his neighbors prefer to huddle when the sun is up. The five pubs he passes on the way are packed with that life hiding itself away, half-bloods and Muggles alike drowning their fear together in one of the only pockets of safety in this city for them as sanctioned by the rotted-out Ministry—but Remus doesn’t let himself stop for a drink as he sometimes does after long days and nights underground. He checks, occasionally, for the darkling smudge of Sirius following behind him in the reflections of shattered windows, and sees the fastidious shape of the man trailing dutifully, head down, feet purposeful as though he already knows the way to Remus’ flat.

Remus has already thought, and indeed is still thinking, that it’s likely a disastrous idea to have Sirius back at his flat. The rattle of anticipation just in front of his middle spine is equal parts Pre-Mission nerves and Having-Another-Back-Home nerves, for Remus Lupin hasn’t had another person at his flat in a very long time—not since the folly of falling for a pretty Muggle woman who liked things even rougher than Remus did. In the end, she fled the city when the Eaters lopped off the neighboring district over to shell it out for more hideaways— _They’re getting too close, and I don’t like those masks of theirs. Eerie. Here, call sometime. I’m off for my mum’s in Cork, but I’d hate not to see you again, yeah?_

Of course, he never did call.

Remus reaches his building’s back entry and pretends at the key bolt while he enchants the lock open, the charm barely murmured under his breath. The lobby is empty and feels marginally cavernous at this time of day, high noon here like some bygone era of sanity’s witching hour—the deco-inspired tiling on the floor echoes faintly with each of his steps, the mirrors along the far wall rusting at their corners, the columns and scrolling and honestly the whole pretending at finery feeling amplified now that Remus knows Sirius is about to tromp right through that door behind him—

“Well, you could have _told_ me you were shacking up in Buckingham.”

Remus rolls his eyes as the door falls shut again with a full thud, not turning to meet Sirius’ stare for he can see the reflection of them across the foyer. Neck craned back to see the faded faux fresco on the ceiling, turning in place like a tipsy ballerina, Sirius ogles the place openly. “Come on. Don’t trip over your jaw.”

He hadn’t _meant_ to end up in an egregious-posh building. It had merely been the only place after Minerva passed that had a floor he could buy out all his own, unbothered, free to mourn and brood and plan and think secretly _Perhaps I should leave it behind after all,_ those dangerous thoughts that tend to invade his brain when the moon is a sharp half like a sideways smile and he’s quietly, violently alone. But the solitude of privacy is peaceful.

Which is how he knows immediately, hand frozen over the lift button, that someone has invaded it.

“Back out, get back out,” hissed on scalding steam, finding Sirius’ wrist blindly and tugging hin out of the lift as though it’s wreathed by hexing wards. _Who fucking knows, could be, they don’t tend to pull punches._

“What?” Sirius at least has the propriety to read general tone and asks just under his breath when Remus whirls to stalk back out the door by which they entered. He rounds on Sirius when they step out to the street again, the empty block rimed by all its yawning edges, but Remus can’t feel any semblance of safe. He whips out his wand and scans the both of them, just to be sure.

“I’ve a charm on the button to my floor. Nobody else lives up there but me, there hasn’t been anyone up there _besides_ me for months, and someone broke that charm not three hours ago,” Remus rambles tightly in a whisper, tracing the blue-white of his wandtip over and around the joints of his and Sirius’ bodies with summative quickness. Nothing out of the ordinary ticks its bright little fizzle into red, nothing left over from the invasion besides a keening sense of unease in Remus’ guts, but it does little to assuage him. He reholsters his wand under his right arm and glares at the road back into town.

“What do you propose now then?”

Remus hears the thin border of piquant amusement in Sirius’ voice, the sort that says _I’ve A Very Fine Idea_ , and he doesn’t look away from the road as he twitches one shoulder up in a shrug. He’s tense, more than moderately furious, and thinking a mile per minute while trying to keep from showing absolutely bloody _any_ of it outwardly. “Go on then, you clearly have a thought for it.”

“I say we head to the kiosk now, camp it for as long as it takes, and cut the mingy fucks off at the pass.”

Sirius looks at Remus with just barely a rise in his eyebrow, and Remus can tell immediately that he’s had the plan on his mind since the beginning. He holds in a withering sigh. “Fine then. We’ll hit them there. Sorry to report you won’t be getting your shower in, although I do hate being indebted.”

“It’s quite alright. I adore having people owe me things. Come along then.”

Remus ignores the tossing in his guts, equal parts fury and magnetic draw towards that shit-eating grin on Sirius’ mouth, and stalks ahead down the empty street toward Lambeth North.

—

Night falls in a slow crawl, moonless, cool on Remus’ skin without the sliver of a crescent looking down but rattling with the tension of the stakeout he’s pitched with Sirius well across the road from the hidden kiosk entrance on a half-broken park bench. They’ve subsisted on dry scones and weak coffee from the Muggle bakery a few shopfronts down for the past few hours, and while Sirius has been blessedly silent from behind an unassuming pair of sunglasses and a newspaper snatched out of some dented, graffitied aluminum dispenser some several paces away, Remus has still had a bitch of time not getting distracted by him.

All things considered, he lets himself think now as he squints toward the half-collapsed little doorway to confirm once more that not a soul has exited or entered it besides his own employees, Sirius Black would be somebody Remus could easily charm into a very pleasant no-strings arrangement. Were he not supposed to be dead and bred from the very stock of people who would prefer to see Remus sprayed across the pavement in glorious gobs of viscera, Remus would have a very fine time indeed wrapping him around one finger. All it might take is a well-placed _Well done then, come on back to mine?_ or even just a look across his desk with a glimmer that hits just so, gaze cut like a diamond to saw into scar tissue and unearth a very willing need to say Yes, Sir that he knows now sits just beneath Sirius’ surface.

But there’s too much at stake. Remus watches him sigh and fold the newspaper as the lack of light becomes too intense to read with sunglasses on, even from beneath a streetlamp. “How goes it?” Sirius hums with accidental harmony along Remus’ wandering train of thought, one eyebrow tinged up from behind the dark lenses covering his eyes. His voice is very soft, which is doing strange things to Remus’ heart. “Any unwanted invitees yet?”

“Not yet.” Remus takes a slow sip of watery coffee and wishes it were gin. They continue waiting.

Remus watches Sirius’ long fingers drum on the arm of the bench from the corner of his eye, watches Sirius seat and re-seat himself and perhaps even take a quick nap in a low slouch for several minutes. _Fucking of course, leave all the hard work to me,_ Remus thinks to himself with a frown. He’s about to nudge Sirius awake and demand he at least share the ability to catch some shuteye by keeping some fucking watch when something strange flickers in the middle-distance just beside the station door.

It’s as if the light bends, just slightly; a little quiver in the nighttime, as though a bird or a bat streaked past in pursuit of a moth. But it’s too close to the entryway to be accidental, and when Remus inhales sharply it stinks of magic. _Eaters._

His elbow rams into Sirius’ side and draws him into waking with a thick snort and very bitter slur of “Merlin fucked and loaded, what?”

“Get on your fucking feet, they’re here.” Remus is up, his wand unholstered and into his sleeve in the same motion, and not waiting another instant for Sirius to collect himself before he’s crossing the street with purposeful, furious strides.

“Oi, alright, Re—hey, _wait!”_

Remus shrugs the hand from his shoulder when Sirius stumbles up behind him several steps across, the empty street yawning out around him, and he whirls to face Remus with a frown apparently so intense that he sees Sirius start. “What.”

Sirius shakes his head and leans in with his voice at a hiss, smelling of coffee and cigarettes and the swirling edge of the city he’s been sitting in for several hours; “Don’t just go barreling in there, are you fucking insane?”

“Do you recall _your_ plan of ‘cut the mingy fucks off at the pass’?” Remus murmurs back, resisting the urge to ball a fist in Sirius’ collar and shake him. Instead, he points viciously at the space before the door where he’d seen the residue of veiled Apparition. “Mingy fucks.” He whips the same finger to the sign for Lambeth North. “Pass.”

Infuriatingly, Sirius rolls his eyes. “Fucking hell, it is so painfully obvious you run everything from your desk. That isn’t how infiltration works.”

He reaches into his coat pocket, a great woolen black number from somewhere deep in the reaches of an overburdened coat rack in Remus’ office that fits Sirius’ more wiry frame with just a bit of a sag in the shoulders—it isn’t endearing, it isn’t, it _really fucking isn’t_ —Remus’ stomach twists with very familiar exhausted exasperataton when he sees what Sirius pulls out from within. “Are you fucking kidding me.”

“No, not in the slightest.” Sirius grins like a stoat as the silvery pour of Potter’s invisibility cloak slips over his fingers, living sand on air, blue-white as the stars pinholed into the sky above them and just barely-there with liquid yield. Sirius pulls it out to a full length, casually flapping it out flat like a bedsheet, and whips it around his shoulders in one go. He leaves one arm extended, inviting, one half of his body obscured while his head and the waiting length of the space clearly left for Remus stand out against the opposite side of the cloak. Remus glares.

“You weren’t content just to steal from my ledgers? You had to take from my security officer as well?”

“He wasn’t using it. And besides, that’s the nice part about stealing something invisible; it’s fucking invisible.”

Remus tightens his fist and craves something to smoke in lieu of his old, itching compulsion to bite his nails to the quick. “You’re an insolent shit.”

“You’re the one holding me hostage. Here, get in, don’t want them bombing anything while we hen about my attitude out here, do we?” Sirius tosses the loose end of the cloak with his extended hand like a grimy matador. Remus wants at once to break his fingers and kiss him breathless. He swears under his own breath and strides forward.

“If I hadn’t sworn you back in one piece,” Remus murmurs as he ducks into the secreted scrim-dark of Potter’s invisibility cloak too near to Sirius’ warmth to be entirely on the proper sort of alert, “you’d be at the end of a curse right now.”

Sirius laughs, soft and low in his throat, and Remus shoulders away the shuddering pulse of pleasure at the sound. “Don’t threaten me with a good time, Lupin.” Remus glances warning at him, an automatic response to insubordination, and absorbs the lancing heat of a knowing stare at him in their covered secrecy, heady as the anteroom of some theatre box or shaded alcove, flashing from Sirius’ stare. “Sorry, _sir.”_

The correction hits home at the pit of Remus’ chest in a crimson-hot bloom, but he huffs it away with a turn of his heel and propels them both shuffling under the silken susurration of somebody else’s cloak toward the kiosk entrance.

The door opens silently to Remus’ familiar touch and shuts behind just as soundless once Sirius shuffles in beside him. It should be awkward to share the space of walking with one like this, shoulders and hips knocking together like scrying bones in the cloying stillness of a station unoccupied from eight o’clock at night to six o’clock the next morning, but Remus finds with a little prod at the back of his mind that having Sirius too close to him still somehow, maddeningly, doesn’t feel nearly close enough. He distracts himself by keeping his ears primed to catch any signal of invasion—the clatter of rubble, the hiss of a silenced spell, the too-late deafening crash of a bomb going off. His guts grip hard around dread, and Remus compacts it tidily with the hard calcification of all his other emotions.

“Where would be the worst place to detonate something in here?” Sirius whispers. Remus continues scanning the station with quick flicks of his eyes as they begin descending a high staircase, once a Muggle escalator now frozen into naught but steps for a long-failed mechanism.

“Don’t you mean the best place?”

Sirius snorts softly, barely there, _Lippy to the last, aren’t you?_   “Semantics.”

“At the entrance to the kiosk, right where the east side of the tube tunnel begins. Non-Purebloods enter through the wall; bombing it would cut off all the wards.”

Sirius picks his way carefully over a large piece of ceiling plaster fallen onto the steps, balancing himself shortly on Remus’ shoulder without thinking. He draws his hand back quickly after a moment, not a titch of embarrassment or misstepping crossing his face as he completes the graceful step on his own with a hint of wobble, but Remus notices the tension light in Sirius’ shoulders like a match. His chest tugs slightly. _Good._ “You’ve a bit of your own penchant for crippling the enemy there, don’t you?” Sirius asks him. He avoids Remus’ eyes.

“It’s somewhat of a requirement for leading your own branch of the resistance, yes, i—”

In an instant, Remus’ instinct to fight tooth and nail for his life kicks in immediately when Sirius’ hand suddenly closes over his mouth, hastily enough to partially cover his nose. While he only just barely stays himself from biting down on the fingers clamping over his lips, Remus still wrenches at Sirius’ wrist, binding it in a hold that could snap it in two if he pressed just so. Sirius wheezes around an arrested yelp—the sound catches in his throat with a scrape, snagging on a fleshy click with the silent slam of his vocal cords, and Remus meets his eyes with a feral stare that demands _What the fuck is wrong with you?!_

“Rosier?”

Remus freezes. Sirius’ hand still plastered over his mouth, fingers still digging into Sirius’ wrist, Remus looks down into the dark of the platform several steps below their place on the stairs.

A cluster of four Death Eaters, masked and robed in full, comes to a stop behind a tall leader with his face turned up to peer into the yawn of the stairwell. A bolt of white-blonde hair hangs long down his back, and a sickening green reign of readied magic is welled at the tip of his wand to light the way. _Lucius._

“Bend your signature,” Sirius hisses, barely audible above Remus’ own pulse, breath hot at Remus’ ear, _“right now.”_

Remus shuts his eyes immediately and slips his magic inward. Part of him lights up with fury like a bad pilot light, rampant and snarling, at the fact he had been so easily distracted to let the Eaters enter without sensing them first. He does his best to push it down and focus on warping the texture of his magic into something less earthy, less sylvan, point it more toward the steel-sharp tang of Unforgivables and the stink of blood purity. Remus feels his magic bend, thrashing slightly as though feeding it a pill it doesn’t want to swallow, but it shifts nonetheless without any further resistance. Sirius’ hand is still plastered about his mouth in a vise, and he can feel it trembling slightly as Sirius works his own shifting press into his magic. Lucius doesn’t move from his spot.

“Rosier, if that’s you, you’re fucking late,” one of the other Eaters barks up at the stairs. Lucius turns sharply to his companion and hisses something unintelligible that sounds vaguely like acidic admonishment while Remus’ thoughts canter up into a sprint to scrape at what to do. They can’t stay here, covered as they are by the invisibility cloak but still dangerously free of defenses. Remus can reach his wand, but how many hexes can he fire off before they notice where the spells are coming from? His heart leaps into his throat when he thinks suddenly of Sirius’ questionable alliances, perhaps so easily bent to where he could simply shove Remus down the steps and have away with it? None of them can Apparate in or out of the station proper, his own fucking wards prevent that. _Of course they do._ Remus looks sideways at Sirius with his eyes only, straining at the corners of his sight, and sees Sirius glaring grimly down at the Eaters. He looks furious and only slightly afraid. He still hasn’t let go of Remus.

Lucius takes a step forward as he turns back to the stairs. Remus twitches to move forward, some foolhardy alpha instinct of his lying dormant at the bottom of his veins kicking up as though the moon decided to fill completely like an eye cracking open, but Sirius’ grip moves to his upper arm and holds him fast to his place. “Don’t you dare,” Sirius breathes into the space of the cloak’s protection.

“What do we fucking do?” Remus hisses back. He keeps his eyes glued to the Eaters as he might a venomous spider waiting high up on a wall, but he flexes his arm in resistance to Sirius’ hold on him. Sirius doesn’t relent, although Remus hears him swallow thickly around the vague cloy of worry.

“Wait. See if they misstep, see if they move on. Do not. Draw on them. First.”

“Why the fuck not?”

“It’s what they expect, they’re fucking Eaters. Don’t play into their hand.”

Remus grinds his jaw and eases his wand down into his palm as smoothly as he can, careful not to fumble the motion and send the wood clattering down the comb-tooth steps at their feet. “And why should I trust you?”

Remus feels Sirius’ fingers stutter in their grip around the fabric of his shirtsleeve, but Lucius is speaking again before Sirius can reply; “There’s someone up there. If it’s you, Evan, give us a Mark.” His wand holds its steady green down by his thigh, readied, just as much a viridescent warning as it is torchlight.

Sirius swears low and violently to himself. “I don’t suppose you know how to fake a Dark Mark?” The whisper is colored with bitterness so sharp Remus is almost surprised it doesn’t light up their position like a signal flare.

“I’m not the one with the blood ties to do it,” Remus bites back just under his breath.

“You’re really fucking good at hitting below the belt, do you know that?”

“Wouldn’t have made it very far as a fucking mud orphan without learning.”

“Fair. A fucking Dark Mark, _can you fucking fake one.”_

“No.”

Remus is almost surprised by the disappointment that skitters across Sirius’ face as he slips his wand out from the inside of his coat, the grim press of his lips twisting up into a wry smile. Somehow, Remus chips out from the very back of his preoccupation, the expression still looks staggeringly handsome on that face beneath the exhaustion and the stress. “Well then. How many counterjinxes do you have stored in that pretty head of yours?”

Remus swallows and looks back down at Lucius. He somehow manages to ignore the jabbing flirtation. ”Enough.”

“I’m going to give you until the count of four to show us a mark,” Lucius calls up into the stairwell. Remus’ pulse ratchets up to a rolling gallop, _ticka-tum ticka-tum ticka-tum._ He tightens his grip on the hilt of his wand and takes a slow breath. Sirius sniffs a dry laugh to himself.

“I suppose we’ll see about that then, won’t we?” Remus feels his glance like a soft touch, something incohesively tender, and he flicks his eyes over to meet Sirius for just a moment. It’s enough to make his insides tighten sharply.

 _“One.”_ Lucius takes another step toward the stairs, his wand held up parallel to the ground. Remus tightens his stance, and it’s then he realizes Sirius’ left hand is still solid on his arm. It is warm and present and surprisingly reassuring.

“Never did get my shower,” Sirius breathes on a half-voiced sigh, haughtiness put on like a jester’s mask as the single syllable from Lucius’ adder-tenor voice bounces around itself into echo death through the emptied station. Remus can’t help the response that begins burbling to the front of his lips on his own humorless huff of a chuckle.

_“Two.”_

“Never did get to fuck you,” Remus whispers. Sirius cracks into a true snicker, almost too loud but still held dutifully within the tight realm of their hidden invisibility, and Remus can’t help his own honest hilarity of adrenaline that rises in his lungs to make him break into a fit of silent laughter right alongside.

 _“Three!”_ Rubble crunches under Lucius boots as he takes another step forward, one foot up to the first stair, and Remus’ heart is in his throat but Sirius’ hand is still wrapped around his arm and if he has to die here, he thinks suddenly in a streaking thought like lightning across a boiling sky of thunderheads, then maybe he could be alright with that. He had a good run, didn’t he? He’s done much and more with the couple of solid decades he stole out from under Greyback’s nose, he should be proud of himself. Remus inhales steadily, calming the vague trembling in his limbs that might throw his spells in the wrong direction, ready to hear the sharp count of _Four!_ out of Lucius Malfoy’s black-tongued mouth and fire the first yellow flash of magic right at his heart, throw off the cloak, rush headlong into chaos as he was always raised to do— _chaos._

Chaos meets them here before Remus has a chance to realize what’s happening.

In a sudden stumble, one of the Eaters just behind Lucius crumbles with a gurgle just as Remus hears the fricative building on Lucius’ mouth even from behind his mask. Remus’ throat tightens, about to whip the cloak off and take the advantage of Lucius turning his back, but Sirius tugs his arm back, stays him, holds him from folly yet again, and before Remus can yank his arm with a brutal pull he sees it.

He sees _them._

Another bolt of blue magic followed quickly by several jots of orange, and pink and more blue, fly out toward the cluster of Eaters from the mouth of the tube tunnel just beyond the steps. _Directly from_ —“My kiosk, what—who the fuck?!” Remus squints into the dark for a moment while the Eaters clamber amongst themselves, the stairs forgotten, before a cabal of wizards and witches tumble out of the tunnel and are on the Eaters like hawks to field mice.

“Meadowes,” Sirius breathes, in awe, his eyes wide and his face open, _Oh,_ wonder looks absolutely lovely on him.

Remus whips his attention back down to the platform, where another one of the Eaters has collapsed and the three left standing have formed a tight triad of sheilds and quick curses flying like mad dogs from their wandtips, gnarled and charred against the grimy and unflagging life of the resistance swelling up to meet them on the shores of fury.

Meadowes is leading them, Remus sees her immediately; a half-shattered Eater mask decorated with rattling coils of metal around it’s edges on her face, war’s precious jewelry outfitting her as a god of the underworld—if Remus is warden of that sordid place, then she truly is the queen. She whirls and fights with the rhythm of combat in her like a dance, battering forward through the green barrage of hexes and curses as though she might walk through fire itself, her comrades flanking her in flawless ranks. They outnumber the Eaters by at least double, swarming them in a slim but immediate assault, and Remus can only watch with his heart in his mouth until Sirius tugs on his arm again to drag him back into the present.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Sirius murmurs. Another Eater falls, two of Meadowes’ people crumble with soundless shouts into the beyond. Remus bites down on his back teeth until they hum.

“We have to help, they’re on our side.”

“No we most certainly do _not,_ that isn’t our fray.” Sirius’ eyes are iron ice when Remus turns to glare at him.

“They were hiding for an ambush in _my_ kiosk, th—”

“And now they’re fighting _their_ fight, when was the last time you fought them head-on? Direct and proper, man to man where you could see their fucking eyes through their mask?”

Remus glares at the flashing depths of Sirius’ pupils as the sounds of conflict rise around them, splashing off the chipping tiled walls like seabirds screeching over carrion. “I’m not a coward,” he hisses. They aren’t the words he had planned to say, had meant more for something along the lines of _Fuck you,_ and they stick in his throat like burrs. Sirius’ gaze flashes. Another Eater falls; Remus confirms with a quick glance that Lucius is the last one left on the platform, and Meadowes’ three surviving comrades surround him in a rush. Lucius reaches into his robes. Sirius touches Remus’ arm, pulls his attention back, undeniably magnetic, _Merlin,_ the half-light of this place refracting off the cover of Potter’s cloak does amazing things to the facets of Sirius’ stare.

“Wanting to survive doesn’t make you a coward.”

He’s about to ask when the fuck did war make everyone so poetic, but before Remus can draw breath the air shatters around him.

Armageddon roars, knocks Remus onto his back, and sends his vision black as the moonless night looking down on disaster.

—

Minerva is standing as tall as ever, looking out over the rolling sea from the rickety edge of the cabin balcony before him. Remus blinks. The air smells of salt and brine and traces of rain, and he feels the leftover scrape of sand between his fingers. He looks down at his hands, but he’s just as he has been—this isn’t one of those dreams where he relives his childhood.

Remus clears his throat, a bit awkwardly around a dustiness he tastes there when he swallows and whets his lips. “Don’t stand so close to the railing, you remember when it gave out and I rolled all the way down the dune?”

It earns him a smile from Minerva, a distant thing, and yet she doesn’t come away from the edge. An incoming breeze rousts the wisping curls skirting her forehead. “If I remember correctly, it was because you were sitting on it after I had explicitly told you not to.”

Remus realizes he’s sitting and pushes himself into a stand, brushing a fine white chalk from his trousers. He’s alone, he sees when he glances about shortly, deposited here at the cabin he had burned to ashes years ago. “I’ve never liked rules, Minnie, you know that.”

He is struck, when Minerva turns, by how sad this particular smile of hers is. Remus slides his hands into his pockets, furrowing his brow, and watches the wind catch and drag at the edges of Minerva’s robes for a moment. She breaks the silence with a light sigh. “You’ve done good things with what I left you.”

“How do you mean?”

“What else would you rather me talk about, your clothes?” Minerva nods at Remus’ shirt, streaked with more of that fine, white dust, and shakes her head. “No. Metaphors are silly things. You’ve a choice to make, Remus, and ideally quite soon.”

Remus’ frown deepens as he absently swipes at the chalky grit powdered across his coat, through his hair, along the skin of his hands. “I was in the station—”

“And Lucius decided enough was enough. I’d be surprised if even the tunnels are anything but dust, he charmed that bomb within an inch of its life.”

Minerva watches him coolly with those tabby eyes, taking in every tick of his expression as Remus reels through the gasping half-second of suspension before slamming into the grey oblivion of this place—the station, the fury, _grey._ Remus’ stomach twists. “Sirius.”

“The spy,” Minerva hums. “He was cooperating, wasn’t he? How did you manage that?”

Remus swallows, trying to remember in that final moment of clarity whether or not he managed to throw himself in front of Sirius—that compulsion to guard him, protect him, continually welling up even while Remus had him locked away in his brig; bleeding down like moonlight, the stars eyeing his every move as though keeping track of their own, _Don’t let him slip just because you might._ “I—he wanted to help.”

Minerva raises one greying eyebrow. She had only just started to pepper at her temples when she passed, and Remus is surprised to notice now that she’s got more age about her somehow in this place. “He wanted to run,” she amends for him.

Remus suddenly finds himself sparked through with incongruous defensiveness. “I was going to follow him.”

A gull cries overhead, its patch of song long and mournful with the descending throws of seabird sighs. Remus takes several stilling breaths through his nose and nods, resolute, staring deeply into the lion’s den of Minerva’s eyes. “I was going to follow him,” he repeats. His voice trembles but once.

Minerva turns back to the ocean, placid, and runs her hands along the railing that used to splinter Remus’ hands something fierce when he was younger. Several waves live and die in the time it takes her to eventually look over her shoulder and eye Remus softly. “I told you,” she says with calm observance, “that you would need someone to catch you when you slipped.”

Remus thinks immediately back to that summer storm, all steel-black in the skies above the water, Minerva holding his hand in her own with bones frail as reeds. They had been just inside that door there, everything locked tight, and still the rain and wind had lashed at the cabin as if nature knew how deeply Remus had to mourn. He nods again and stares down at his dusty hands. “You did.”

“Do you think he would be able to hold you up?”

Remus thinks back to the feeling of Sirius’ hand on his arm, the stolid comfort of touch of which he had starved himself for so long thinking it some sort of benefit to all his operations—but no. Forgoing the warmth of closeness had clearly only put unnecessary hurdles in Remus’ way if he can find himself so ineffably drawn to someone else. “I would be shocked if he couldn’t.”

Minerva smiles again, this time to herself and this time with calm approval sitting quietly at the tightened corners of her mouth. “Go on then, Lupin,” she says into the gust of a sandy passing wind, “slip away.”

The wind rips past then, a sharp uptick of air, and Remus has to close his eyes against the sting of it. He squints through his lashes with his arms up to guard against its lashing, but his vision scrims over as his hair begins tossing with the whipping swirl around it. Dust invades his vision from every edge, the roaring sound of the gulls mixing with the rushing sea in a cacophonous white noise, cotton in his ears and dry in his mouth to roar, mute; all goes white, then grey, and then a very absent black.

—

The first few breaths Remus truly draws are thick, holey things, shorn in his chest and mealy up through his throat. He coughs once and the sound of it rings dully around him, high brick walls slapping the sound back and forth between themselves, a thin alleyway. Remus pitches forward, folded haphazardly into a sit by someone who is not him, and heaves a dry raucous of coughing gulps on cold air like ice water.

“Oh, thank bleeding, burning fuck.”

He can’t quit coughing now that he’s started, hacking up gobs of dusty ash and the yellowish spittle around it, but relief at Sirius’ voice cards through Remus like a fine-toothed comb despite its own tattered corners. He continues coughing on the pavement, spitting gobs of congealed dust every few heaves, and only sits back against the wall when he can draw breath without feeling it rattle around with what seems like leagues of sand in his chest. Remus tips his face up to the sky and closes his eyes. His coat’s gone, his sleeves are torn, he can feel a sticky patch of dried blood on his forearm from some errant cut. The chill around him feels good. “How’d we get out?”

Sirius has enough grace not to comment on how raw Remus’ voice is as Remus hears him shuffle into a heavy sit a pace away. “Carried you back up the steps, the roof fell in and you got clipped by a piece of it. You’re a heavy fuck, you know that?”

“‘M not fucking sorry. And then we Apparated?” Remus coughs again and itches for a cigar, rubbing at his eyes and blinking several times before squaring his attention over to Sirius. His black hair and every high point of his body is streaked by the same white dust all over Remus, a fresh scrape scored across one cheek where his black eye had almost completely healed. His lip is split again, almost in the same place as his invasion to the compound. Remus is struck with the compulsion to touch is again, which he reigns back sharply. Sirius nods.

“And then we Apparated. I’m not very good at Side-Along, so you’re welcome for not splinching you.”

“Cheers, thanks, fucking wonderful to know I could have lost a limb.”

Sirius leans back against the wall behind him with a whisper of brick dust and heaves a heavy sigh, the long column of his throat easing with it like the flanks of some powerful creature at rest. Remus does not let himself dwell on how alluring it looks from here. “Yeah, well. You didn’t. And we’re both alive. You’re welcome.”

They remain silent between the both of them for several minutes, staring up at the moon-empty sky and gathering what Remus can only guess is their collective rattled thoughts if his own reeling mind is anything to go by. Eventually, Remus vents a low breath. “They’re all dead, I suppose?”

“I’ll bet money Meadowes got out somehow, the woman’s more magic than matter; but I’d say every Eater and at least most of the resistors are dust.” Sirius’ eyes are closed, and he speaks into the air as though unburdening himself of a very pressing weight. Remus nods slowly to himself and pinches a clump of dust out of his nose with a short sniff.

“So I’d suspect by all counts I’m also dead now, aren’t I?” His voice is hoarse, but the dry bite of it carries as well as he’d hoped. Sirius lolls his head over to look at Remus and gift him a subtle little smile, all teeth.

“I would think so. Welcome to the great beyond, Mr. Lupin.”

They catch their breath for a long while in that alley before cobbling themselves into a stand, Remus whacked not only on his head but likely also his side for the way his ribs protest with a bruised pang when he tries to lengthen up to his full height. Sirius casts a quick and tidy cleansing spell over them to get rid of the dust and much of the grime on them along with it, and takes Remus’ arm across his shoulders to let Remus lean quite heavily into him. Sirius has surprising solidity to his carriage. He snaps them away with a crack and the uncomfortable tug of Apparation, not announcing to where but as far as Remus is concerned any place is better than Shitty London Alley Number Ninety-Five-and-a-Half. Remus doesn’t press and instead, for once, lets himself be led along by someone else.

His feet meet ground again and the jarring sound of crickets wells up around him, the shuffling sound of leaves in tree branches, nighttime sounds Remus hasn’t heard beyond the wolf’s perception in years. He looks around, wondering if Sirius is playing his own idea of a knife-twisting joke to bring Remus to that same village outside of which he runs each moon, but Sirius’ attention is focused sharply on the wan yellow glow of a damp-looking motel across the road crossing quickly under their stumbling feet. “Where are we?”

Sirius twitches his eyebrows up, as good a shrug as he can manage with his shoulders busied by Remus’ weight. “Not London.”

“Fair enough.”

The lobby has a ceiling so low Remus almost bumps his forehead on a support beam when they enter sideways through a door that all but shrieks on its hinges. It’s a Victorian monstrosity, all squat-square and sloping more than slightly in the floorboards, and Remus can see an aghast question of something building behind the proprietor’s bottle-thick spectacle lenses when he looks up from a laughably small Muggle television and sees the state of disrepair between the two men. Sirius has his wand out and pointed sharply at the turtle-shaped man before he can open his mouth. “We’ll take any room with an east-facing window, no telly needed, we’ve paid in full plus a hefty tip, we’re the quietest and most pleasant guests you’ve ever had, and you’re really going to give this place a good scrub in the morning.”

Quick threads of silver magic jet out from Sirius’ wand and wrap around the gawping old man in an instant, webbing across his face, and he shuts his mouth and nods distantly before turning to a very full rack of keys behind the desk.

“Did you honestly just use an Unforgivable on the poor man?” Remus says under his breath. Sirius snorts to himself.

“Don’t be silly, how cloddish do you think I am? Homebrew charms. Try it sometime.” Sirius twitches his eyebrows up, his smile sideways, a flash of brilliance before he turns back to the old man extending an old key with a limp wrist. “Thank you so much! Very appreciated. Remember: a good scrub in the morning.” The threads of magic around his head skitter down to the slack opening of his mouth and crawl in with quick little zips of movement, hiding within like a march of spiders, and in a moment he blinks, gaze foggy, and gives a half-distracted little nod at Sirius. When he turns back to the television, it’s as though he’s already forgotten about handing over the key. Sirius looks very pleased with himself when he and Remus shoulder back outside to tromp over to the room denoted on the key fob.

“Don’t look so guilty,” Remus hisses. Sirius only chuckles. Remus’ heart turns in his chest, and it isn’t an unpleasant feeling at all.

The room has two rickety twin beds, a dresser that looks as though William of Orange himself might have stored shirts in it once, a veritable shoebox of a bath, and one very small window on the eastern wall. Remus unshrugs himself out from under Sirius’ arm, lets his coat flop to the floor, and collapses on the far bed, wincing with the tug it gives to his torso and the very obvious lumps of ancient springs pressing beneath his spine. It isn’t concrete or a public bench, and so it’s very near to Eden. He voices a low sigh and sinks into the fusty quilt, not bothering to burrow under it as he shuts his eyes. _“Fuck.”_

“I agree completely,” Sirius says loftily. The shuffle of clothing being tugged off rasps in the muzzy quiet of the room just after Sirius locks the door and draws the shade over the window with a quick _snink._ Remus forces himself to keep his eyes shut.

“Muggle warfare is exhausting,” he settles for muttering. His insides are _not_ coiling in and around himself very sweetly while he ignores the image of Sirius Black right in front of him without clothing on, they are very well not.

Sirius chuckles. His belt jangles and a dull hit on the carpet belies his trousers slipping off. Remus does _not open his fucking eyes._ “Isn’t it? Barbaric, bursting shit to pieces when they could just stop some hearts very quietly with a wizard or two on their side.” He sighs heavily, and the sound moves across the room toward the bath. “I’m finally for my fucking shower, do you need anything?”

There’s a pause at the end of Sirius’ question very like an intake of breath, something on the cusp of a question that Remus knows with every fiber of his veins is _Would you like to join me?_ He swallows, eyes shut tight, and shakes his head. “I’m fine to lie here, thank you. Haven’t really stopped moving since last week.”

Sirius sniffs a laugh to himself while his voice bleeds into the echo of tiled walls, far more intimate than the shout of the underground echo— _Underground, underash, underblood, undereyes, underglass,_ Remus’ mind reels unhelpfully as his attention unspools. “Take your time. Goodness knows I’m going to.”

The door shuts, the pipes rattle as the hiss of water sputters up behind it, and Remus drifts into a minor madness of black, dreamless sleep for a stretch of time that seems like an eternity.

He wakes with a soft touch to his ankle, shoes still on, opening his eyes instinctively with a sharp inhale to see Sirius look at him through a tousled fall of wet ink hair. “Good sleep?”

Remus swallows and wipes a hand down his face, swiping himself back into consciousness, shifting higher on the bed into more of sit rather than a sprawl. “Yeah, it—didn’t even realize I’d drifted. Good wash?”

“Fucking _heavenly.”_   Sirius’ expression flashes with mirth, and Remus sees he has a threadbare towel wrapped around his waist. He feels heat rise in his face, but he wrests off the compulsion to stare at the dark trail of subtle curls leading down from Sirius’ still-wet stomach into the cover of privacy. Sirius turns, his back to Remus, and shakes his fingers through his hair. “Hot water ran out after maybe five minutes, but I wasn’t to be defeated that easily. Still paradise compared to the shit in your brig, no offense.”

“None taken,” Remus hums, dry and distant and trying very hard not to stare at the shape of Sirius’ backside under his towel. It reaches to his knees, but the curve of his lower back is powerful and delicate at the same time in a way that makes Remus want to dig his thumbs into it and— _Fuck, stop it._ He shifts to make sure his trousers don’t tighten too obviously.

Sirius dries himself off with a second towel in quick passes, whistling some aimless little tune very softly to himself as he goes. The clock on the tiny nightstand propped between the two beds ticks quite loudly beside Remus’ ear. He can already tell he’s going to have trouble sleeping.

Without preamble, Sirius turns to face him with arms akimbo. “Right, shove off, I want this one.” He points at the mattress. Remus throws him a look that could sour lemon curd.

“Like fuck.”

“I Apparated us here, you ungrateful minge.” Sirius prods at Remus hip with the flat of his hand, not managing to budge Remus by even a little. “I don’t sleep well near doors, move.”

“I don’t sleep well with _massive bruising along my entire fucking body,_ neither of us will get much sleep regardless,” Remus growls. Sirius rolls his eyes.

“Rich, coming from the one who just napped through the symphony of shit-tier plumbing. Get up.”

Sirius prods at his side again, a knowing push right against what feels like the worst of the tenderness striated across his ribs, and Remus yelps as his body instinctively knives to the side. He hisses out a low string of curdled oaths, clutching immediately at the side of his chest, and groans through his teeth when Sirius shimmies onto the sliver of mattress revealed there. His hair is still damp. He smells of soap and nicotine wrapped around the edge of a shattered window in the summertime. Remus clenches his jaw and wriggles to the side, surrendering space with a surly scoff and another sharp wince. “You’re such a fucking dog.”

“Bark-ity fucking bark, thanks, you’re still on my bed.” Sirius flips over to face Remus, still in his towel, still mostly nude and _Shit,_ he knows it—eyeing Remus like that with something acute behind those eyes, each of them balanced weirdly on the very end of a mattress hardly big enough for one, let alone two tall men with nowhere else to go. He quirks one eyebrow. “Unless you don’t intend to sleep in your own bed after all?”

Remus tightens the line of his mouth and furrows his brow. “Shut up.”

 _“There_ it is,” Sirius croons. He shifts his chin on the propped platform of his fist, looking down the length of his lowered lashes at Remus with a slow smirk on his lips. “You said it yourself, never did get to fuck me. We’ve got nothing but time and privacy on our side now though.”

At once, Remus wants to strangle and praise his past self, stuck terrified and desperate in the middle of a broken escalator with little left to do but scratch at his deepest desires. He settles for redoubling his glare at Sirius. “You’re a fucking spy, and I—”

"...am precisely as dead as the world thinks Sirius Orion Black has been for years now,” Sirius cuts in, sharp as a paring knife cutting into the peachy flesh of Remus’ resistance. He keeps smiling, but his eyes do what Remus now realizes is a very Sirius-brand thing and glimmer just a tick brighter with a certain ferocity behind his pupils. “By morning, all of London will believe you’ve been killed. You’re free. Let yourself fucking live a little.”

Remus means to bite back with a snarl of _I can’t just fucking run away,_ but he stops himself. The vivid vision of Minerva by the seaside, her hands open to him and her face calm as he she told him to _Slip away,_ the arbiter of his life from childhood until now, saddling him with responsibility after delicate responsibility until, what? He passed some sort of test and could now finally leave? Has running full-tilt into disaster always been an option for finding some fucking peace for once in his life?

“I—did you mean what you said? Back in the tunnel?” Remus’ voice feels raw and small and all sorts of weak, but he doesn’t move to amend at as he stares instead at the shoddy weave of the quilt beside his head.

“What, ‘you’ve a bit of your own penchant for crippling the enemy’?” Sirius shifts, laying his arm straight out and lowering his head to rest on it to put his sightline level with Remus’. Remus glances up at him, wants to hold his eyes, can’t. He shakes his head.

“No, ‘wanting to survive doesn’t make you a coward’. How do you know that’s true?”

Sirius sighs lightly and begins to wind and unwind a lock of his hair through his forefinger and thumb. “I’ve been called many accurate things through my life, but coward was never one of them. Courage is a lie they tell to people who would see themselves lionized for not looking at every option before they act.”

“But—”

“Selfishness ceases being selfish the moment it saves your fucking skin,” Sirius hisses. Remus looks back up at him, and this time he finds he’s able to keep on that silver stare. “Life is full of of bullshit that will get you killed, you of all people should know that. Wanting to make even a bit of that better with some fucking mercy or some shred of happiness isn’t a weakness, Remus, it’s human fucking nature. Yeah?”

If he hadn’t just been pummeled by a collapsing structure, Remus would probably deny that until he turned to stone. But as it stands, he’s too tired to do anything besides let his deeper needs melt up to the surface and expose his heart like the sad sack of shuddering need it’s become over the years beneath all his layers of resistance. He licks his lips, glances at Sirius’ mouth, and nods. “Yeah.”

Sirius reaches across to touch at Remus’ hair, so lightly that Remus has to shut his eyes against the shudder of closeness for a moment, and Remus feels him shift closer along the wheeze of the mattress springs. His whisper is close and ghosts against Remus’ own mouth when he eventually speaks; “Now are you going to embrace the fact you don’t have to pretend at that land-of-the-living shit anymore or not?”

Words fail, and so instead of answering with words Remus pulls Sirius in by the curve of his shoulder and kisses him as soundly as he’s been wanting to for the past solid week.

Sirius curves into it like water, slipping his own arm down around Remus’ waist to draw their bodies flush while Remus reaches up to cradle the side of Sirius’ face in one hand. He hisses in with pain at one errant press along his side that gets subsequently kissed away in silent apology by Sirius, his lips fluent as a healer’s magic against Remus’ mouth and leagues warmer. Remus slides his hand back, down to the nape of Sirius’ neck and into the hair he’d initially only used as an anchor, his tool, the crop of a position made to bend others to his will when perhaps all he’d needed along the way was somebody to tell him that losing control might not have ended the world after all.

They kiss as though the air between their lips is the only breathable air in the room, and eventually Sirius flips them to climb astride Remus’ hips and kiss him down into the mattress. His hair pools down around him like a veil, secreting them against the knocking of the radiator and the thrush-y ticking of the old table clock, and Remus imagines that regimes could live and die by the press of these lips, Sirius has no idea the _power_ this act holds—but of course he does, he’s brilliant, he’s straddling Remus and he’s kissing him, and he’s hardly got his towel wrapped around his hips anymore and he’s _brilliant._

“You didn’t balk when I called you Remus earlier,” Sirius murmurs against Remus’ neck, on a brief foray into pathing all of Remus’ reachable skin with his mouth. He sounds acutely amused by that, and Remus tightens his hold on both the back of Remus’ neck and the increasing expanse of reachable hipbone as his towel eases away with the motion of continually pressing nearer to Remus.

“Dead men don’t have fucking offices,” he growls, directing Sirius back to his lips and slipping his tongue past Sirius’ teeth with renewed vigor.

The give and take of very active kissing sees the patching terry weave of Sirius’ towel sliding completely to the ground after several more moments. He breathes a small sound against Remus’ lips at the same time Remus feels the hot touch of Sirius’ freed arousal pressing into his own through the front of his trousers.

“Fuck,” Sirius chokes out into the flat of Remus’ cheek as he grinds himself down in earnest, flush with the crease of Remus’ hip and slipping easily along it with a languid roll of his hips. Remus watches, rapt and predatory, pressing encouragingly at the pale swell of Sirius’ thigh.

“Do you want to keep working yourself off on me,” Remus murmurs, stroking one hand up to thumb slowly across Sirius’ nipple, “or do you want me to fuck you?”

Sirius’ body is flushed beneath all the welts of the last few days, stumbling through survival and slipping away from disaster by the skin of his teeth, and it’s without a doubt the most glorious thing Remus has ever seen as he arches into Remus’ touch and bites down on his lip. “Fuck me, fuck me, please, _oh.”_

Remus shifts to sit up a bit more, stuttering against the pain painting his torso, and begins working at his belt buckle. “I’m not going to be able to stand up and do this, so I—”

“Leave it to me,” Sirius gasps, batting Remus’ hand away to set to this belt himself. He unloops it swiftly, shuffling aside the button and zipper of Remus’ trousers in the same twist of his wrist, his expression hungry and his touch insistent as he works to bare Remus before him. He helps Remus ease his waistband down his thighs, freeing Remus’ readied length, and drinks in the sight for an indulgent moment. Sirius makes a light sound to himself that almost sounds like a whimper. “Oh, I guessed _so_ fucking correctly.”

Remus tries not to let his pride swell, but a tremor of approval runs through his chest. He knits one fist into Sirius’ hair and brings the other between Sirius’ thighs, reveling in the way Sirius tries to melt into both points of contact at once. “Prep spells?”

The devil-may-care grin with which Sirius’ replies goes straight down to Remus’ pelvis. “Why do you think I took my sweet time in the shower?”

Remus clenches his jaw and throws the dregs of his caution to the wind.

Pressing up into Sirius is a holy rite made manifest, the hot arrival of need and desire at once that so overwhelms Remus that he shuts his eyes and groans low, voice rough, in and in and _in,_ there, bottoming out and pausing for a moment at the hilt just to make sure he doesn’t crumble with the shuddering of his own longing. It’s Sirius’ hips that move first, rolling forward, Sirius who makes another one of those gentle sounds into the air, balances himself with both hands on Remus’ shoulders and begins riding Remus with a steady pace that feels like what Remus never quite let himself imagine total bliss could be.

They find a pace that suffices for a little while until both their collective need for sensation dashes it to bits, falling instead into a harried canter of desperate bucking, delving, gasping for one another, for “More,” Sirius pants, “Harder, fucking _choke me.”_

Remus slides his hand up, trembling slightly for the onslaught of sensation rioting through his body, and closes it around the swannish perfection of Sirius’ neck. He presses at each side, his fingers gripping pliant into the dove-soft skin, as Sirius presses closer to him and shut his eyes, euphoric, body tense and searching blindly for release. Remus feels his own limit approaching, sees it at the backs of his eyes like the sun bending in the oilslick of an ocean horizon, and flexes his hand around the swell of Sirius’ backside.

“You look so good fucking yourself on me like this,” Remus whispers, holding himself just barely there against Sirius’ lips. Sirius gasps for thrilled breath around his grip, working himself off with a sinful-good angle that Remus knows is hitting the perfect spot again and again for him, more than happy to partake from below like this. “You’ve got me _so close,_ Sirius.”

Remus crushes a kiss against Sirius’ lips, sloppy and hard and so perfectly intent, just before letting go of Sirius’ neck and inviting the rush of oxygen back into his lungs just as Remus pulls back from it. Sirius gasps, his throat catching, every muscle tightening—and then he’s spilling in a rush like gold, Remus’ name streaming from his mouth in a broken cry, pent-up for days and sprawling across Remus’ shirt in a wild series of rich pulses that slams Remus up against his own approaching end. Sirius’ pace doesn’t let up as he sees himself through it, riding out the ecstasy, taking Remus in full with such unflagging attention that Remus can hardly hold onto vision as he veers hard past the point of no return and spills, deeply, with a long groan into the dip of Sirius’ shoulder. He sees white and the star-blue flash of silver as the feeling arcs through him, the quick of an arrow like Sirius’ sharp eyes watching him through the dark.

They catch their breath against one another, and Remus is only marginally surprised to find himself clutching tightly to Sirius with his cheek pressed to the pale, heaving chest as he rediscovers his own center. “Good?” he croaks. Sirius laughs breathlessly to himself, cards a hand through Remus’ hair, and shifts into a more comfortable boneless lean against Remus.

“Extremely. We’ll leave for somewhere else in the morning, yeah? But now we should sleep.”

“Now we should sleep,” Remus parrots, his voice still raw, still entwined with Sirius. He doesn’t plan on letting go any time soon.

 _Slip away,_ Minerva had told him, and so slip he shall. Like sand through an hourglass, untraceable and easily melting into the next second with anonymity’s grace, Remus and Sirius will indeed slip into every day that faces them down across the long and unknowable future.


End file.
